Noting Mario Götze’s transfer from Borussia Dortmund to Bayern Munich with a quizzical puff of the pipe over an unfurled broadsheet and scones*, Football Burp got thinking: what else can £31.5m get you these days?

As such, here are ten things that cost the same as German football’s record signing…

1. Picasso’s Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto, “a masterpiece from the artist’s blue period showing the decadent and haggard figure of his friend and fellow artist, drooping over a glass of absinthe”.

2. A manufacturing plant in Teeside with the potential to create 220 jobs.

3. A swimming pool complex in Dundee with a 50m competition pool, a wave pool, rapid river, dive pool, flumes and a fitness suite.

4. A Noho office building in central London (this link has been removed at the request of the website owner).

5. The House of Fraser store in Guildford, Surrey.

6. The upgrading of Frankley Water Treatment Works (WTW) in Frankley, Birmingham for Severn Trent Water.

7. Seven years’ worth of IT service provision for Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust (LWFT) and Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust (AHFT).

8. A three-mile stretch of carriageway on the main A96 Aberdeen-Inverness road aimed at helping to ease congestion in both towns.

9. Healthier people in Bradford.

10. Javi Martinez?

£31.5m is also the amount it took for JJB Sports to stave off closure for six weeks in 2011 and the rise in profits during the last financial year for the Nando’s chain of restaurants.

Do you know of anything else that costs the same as Mario Götze? Have your say in the comments section below…

(*There was also tea, lots and lots of tea, as well as lashings of rum, hearty singalongs and wines and spices the likes of which ye’ll never have seen. These are the standard provisions laid on in our Thinking About Things That Cost the Same as Footballers quarters.)