With a certain Spanish forward still shooting blanks for Andre Villas-Boas’ erratic Chelsea side, Football Burp got wondering: what else can fifty million of Her Majesty’s pounds get you these days? And so, we bring you twenty recent examples of Things That Cost the Same as Fernando Torres…(click on the Things in question to read a bit more about them)…

1. A series of television adverts featuring Martin Clunes alongside an animatronic dog.

2. A holiday village in west Wales aimed at attracting Chinese tourists. 

3. A Treasury-funded enhancement of the overnight sleeper service between Scotland and London.

4. A separate injection of cash, from the Scottish government, to secure the future of the Inverness sleeper service.

5. The cumulative total of the false declarations made in the so-called “black fish scam”, in which seventeen skippers and a fish processing company Shetland Catch Ltd in Lerwick were implicated.

6. A loan fund to help charities in Scotland buy buildings to create “third sector business centres”.

7. A bail-out of Welsh NHS boards.

8. Unburdening your multinational retailing group of lossmaking electrical retail chain Comet.

9. A “Leisuredome” in Weston-super-Mare that will boast a 210-metre indoor ski slope, indoor surfing and sky diving, BMX and skateboard park, a gym, a children’s centre and meeting facilities.

10. Measures to keep Bournville, the home of Cadbury’s, at the heart of the chocolate industry (at the expense of people’s jobs, seemingly).

11. The total Christmas shopping expenditure in Northern Ireland on December 23rd.

12. A three-year deal to keep Formula 1 star Lewis Hamilton with McLaren. 

13. A quantity of cocaine recently seized by police in Rochester, Kent.

14. The UK’s daily gross contribution to the EU, according to analysis of figures supplied by the Office for National Statistics.

15. The combined losses of Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays attributed to pressure from ministers not to pull the plug on Southern Cross, Britain’s biggest nursing homes operator.

16. Two-hundred and seventy-one previously unknown pictures by Pablo Picasso.

17. A design and build contract to deliver a mixed-use scheme at Stourport-on-Seven canal basin, near Kidderminster.

18. A fund from the UK Department of Transport that aims to improve partnership working between bus operators and local authorities in order to boost bus use.

19. A state-of-the-art transformation of Bradford College.

20. A “contemporary all-weather family dining and leisure facility” in Bournemouth town centre estimated to create three-hundred jobs. 

Do you know of anything else that cost the same as Fernando Torres? Have your say in the comments section below…