You might have heard about Real Madrid sticking in an £85m bid for Tottenham Hotspur star Gareth Bale – yes, that’s even more than they paid for that other one, the fella he nicked his free kick routine off.

Anyway, this got Football Burp wondering: what else can eighty-five million of Her Majesty’s pounds get you these days?

We had a little look around and unearthed the following ten recent(-ish) examples of things that the money could be/could have been spent on instead…(click on each thing in question to read more about it, okay?)…

10 things that would cost the same as Gareth Bale

1. The London Crowne Plaza hotel

2. A regeneration of east London’s Abbey Wood that will comprise of 216 new homes, an 80-bed hotel, 5,000 square feet of commercial space, a nursery, a new public square and a supermarket which has been pre-let to Sainsbury’s

3. Funding for more than twenty universities across the UK to support and strengthen existing research in the areas of robotics and autonomous systems, advanced materials and grid-scale energy storage.

4. Three biospheres – polar, temperate and tropical – constructed on derelict land at the Cuningar Loop in South Lanarkshire, each containing plants and animals native to the corresponding climate.

5. Six years’ worth of services at Wolf Minerals’ tungsten and tin mine at Hemerdon near Plymouth

6. The “major upgrade” of Port of Dover’s Eastern Docks ferry terminal

7. Failing to comply with rules on agricultural payments

8. The development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicle technologies since 2009

9. The secondhand car market

10. The total debt of unpaid Council Tax in Wales for the year 2012-13

SEE ALSO: 10 more things that cost the same as Gareth Bale

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