I'm Worth As Much as This Plane
Yesterday England set a record for the most money moved in a January transfer window with the total going north of £200M.
The Guardian had a bit of fun during their liveblog valuing yesterday’s player transfers in Darren Bents (i.e. how many Darren Bents a given amount would buy based on the cost of his move from Sunderland to Aston Villa earlier in the window).
We sort of ripped that off and used both a Bebe and a modified Bebe scale (the modified being based on the astute observation by a commenter than Bebe himself was only worth .15 Bebe’s).
It’s all in good fun until you realize that Andy Carroll is now the eighth largest transfer move of all time (Torres’ £50M move is fourth) and the largest ever for an English player.
Andy Carroll. With a total 41 Premier League appearances.
We had a minor backroom debate over whether or not this was a good use of funds. And who knows? Carroll could become the most feared striker in England. He’s big, physical, and still young (he just turned 22 in early January). He could also turn out to be no better than he is now.
But for £35M?
So we’re turning the Darren Bent scale on its head a bit and letting you know what one Andy Carroll could buy:
22.3 seasons of the Chicago Fire
Given the 2010 base salaries you could finance the entire roster of the Chicago Fire for over 22 seasons. And if you consider that Brian McBride’s salary of over $400K is no longer on the books, you could probably tack another half dozen or so seasons on top of that. Of course that also assumes Don Garber won’t raise the salary cap for two decades… which might not be that unreasonable of an assumption.
28,180 Super Bowl tickets
This is sort of a guess. This morning I talked to the guy who lives upstairs from me. He’s a Packer fan and has been looking for tickets. He said he hasn’t found anything decent for under two grand. So, that’s the very unscientific number I used for the cost of a ticket. Anyway, one Andy Carroll buys you 35% of capacity for the game this weekend. So when you’re watching you can look at the size of the crowd and marvel, “Wow, that’s like three Andy Carroll’s.”
805,142 replica Liverpool jerseys
According to Wikipedia, the population of Liverpool is only 434,900. You could almost buy everyone in the city two replica kits, although the Evertonians probably won’t care much for one, much less two. Unless they want to join the Liverpool fans in burning the ones that say ‘Torres’ on the back of them.
112,720 iPads
That’s the cheap ones. Just for a little perspective: You could hand everyone at Anfield and iPad and not run out until you were almost halfway through the third game. That’s assuming of course that Eleventhpool still sell out Anfield.
3.76 productions of The King’s Speech (or you could make The Fighter twice with 6.3M leftover)
The 12-time Oscar-nominated film was made for just $15M (according to Box Office Mojo). And with the box office gross, you could buy almost 1.3 Andy Carroll’s.
1.52 Blackburn Rovers
The Chicken People bought the club for a mere £23M (again, according to Wikipedia). But as James T pointed out yesterday: Why would you want to own Blackburn Rovers?
402.5 Tesla cars
That’s probably more cars than there are charging stations near where anybody lives.
2,027,338 shares of Microsoft stock
Currently trading at $27.80. Not sure that’s a great investment though as, if you look at the 1-year chart, it’s almost exactly where it was in February of 2010.
18,180,645 Gallons of gas
Given the current national average according to the U.S. government. You’ll have to do your own calculation to find out how many liters of petrol you’d get.
47,945 grams of Cocaine or 12,635,379 tabs of Ecstasy
You could have either Andy Carroll or you could throw the most awesome rager in the history of man kind. We’re inclined to think we’d throw the party. Alternatively, you could simply dose the entire population of Zimbabwe once. If World Peace isn’t ever going to happen, for about 3 hours we could at least get one country to be entirely peaceful… Or you could buy Andy Carroll. Kind of makes people seem silly and selfish, huh?
35 Andy Carrolls
As was widely reported yesterday, Andy Carroll was offered to West Ham in the summer of 2009 for £1M. Even Andy Carroll is worth a lot of Andy Carroll’s*
(*Yes, I know it’s not a possessive but it’s okay to use an apostrophe to avoid confusion)
Eleventhpool? Ahem…that’s Seventhpool right now, sir.
I’d take the ecstasy.
Two Owen Hargreaveses or three Alex Chamberlains. LIVERPOOL ARE RUINING SOCCER.
James T: If he’s the 2011 Afonso Alves, you’re going to need it.
@PR
I don’t care; I’m high on ecstasy, remember?
Also, I couldn’t believe how cheap E is in the UK. My chemical engineering days are long behind me, but I don’t remember it ever being near that cheap once it was made illegal.
You could foot the entire payroll for the 2009 Florida Marlins for 1 Andy Carroll
@PR
It’ll be cheap as long as Shaun Ryder is in a studio somewhere, hamfisting his way through new songs…
Phil: It’s better than 1.5 of the 2009 Marlins. They were about $35M. Carroll is £35M. Isn’t this like your third or fourth currency conversion fail?
James T: Isn’t that guy dead?
Snow day bootroom? Snow day bootroom!
Random, but you could buy 350 Jussi Jaaskelainens.
DC: These are all random. Save maybe for Zimbabwe. We should totally work to see what it’s like for an entire country to get high.
@PR
Nope. Here he is on the English “celebrity Survivor” spin-off
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFkBehfknco
I had fun talking with a Chelsea-supporting friend this morning. I, of course, goaded him by saying that Villa got a more in-form and less injury-prone striker for half the price. He then proceeded to tell me that Bent was overpriced compared to Oezil and Sneijder (who are CAMs, and not CFs, and players that Chelsea could have used much more than Torres, but all right), while Torres was cheap compared to Ibra.
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The mind reels.
Trolling back through Zlatan transfers, Juve paid 16 mil euros from Ajax, Inter paid 19.5 mil euros from Juve, then 69 mil euros from Inter to Barca. 104.5 mil euros spent in transfer fees on Ibra, not counting what peanuts Ajax paid to sign him when he was young.
OM: Without even looking, I’m almost positive Anelka’s transfer moves add up to more.
Could be–I’m at lunch, let’s see if I can find them all.
Wait, The Telegraph has a listing here–84.8 mil pounds from PSG all the way through to Chelsea, converting to euros and rounding up, 99 million euros for Anelka transfer fees.
OM – a real life Where’s Nico
I’d take the Torres jerseys, but I’d hang them up to taunt Livepool supporters
@Brian
Only if I can hang up an Apostolios Vellios shirt!
You could buy everybody in mexico a bouncy ball with £35 million
@James T, feel free to, I’ve already got my Hodgson pictures at the printers
From now on, when I cite currency figures, just assume that they are entirely wrong. Reason #3,518 why philosophers will never rule the world.
We’ve played a lot of games at home lately…
Glad to see Theo really sticking tight to Baines…
.
And Wilshere’s booked, Balls
FYI there is a bootroom upstairs
Fellaini just mugged Wilshere, this is gonna get physical quickly
refresh please
Apparently Richard Keys phoned up Kenny Dalglish last night regarding the Andy Carroll buy.”You know that British transfer record, did you smash it?”
I’ll get my coat!
You could buy 1.4 Luis Suarezes. That’s a much better deal, tbh.
You could also buy everyone Everton’s bought for the last 3 years :(
How would it be confusing without the apostrophe?
Elby: I went to grade school with someone whose last name was Carrols (just one ‘L’ if I recall correctly). A little strange sounding, yes… but the apostrophe rules out that Andy’s last name might be Carrolls.