Fleet Street Fox: Gareth Bale's £90m Real Madrid wages are ridiculous, so here's some ridiculous ways to spend them

Jokes aside, he's 24, his career has peaked and he's making £29.76 a minute, even when asleep. If I was him, I think I'd sit down and weep...

Bale out? Gareth could boost the economy by paying a year's childcare for 8,653 youngsters

It’s all very well becoming the most expensive footballer of all time. But now what?
At the tender age of 24, Gareth Bale, son of Cardiff and alumni of Southampton and Tottenham, now finds himself one of the most famous, adored and loathed men in the world.

Perhaps he will more than repay Real Madrid for the £86.3m they’ve paid for him, in gate fees, shirt sales, and so on.


Perhaps he will buck the usual trend of highly-priced footballers promptly suffering injury, addiction, or general ineptitude within days of signing the paperwork.

And perhaps Bale has got big plans for the £90m he will personally make in the next six years and which, even with above-the-table tax arrangements, will still be big enough to be mind-boggling.

That’s £300,000 a week, £42,857 a day, £1,786 an hour, £29.76 every single minute, even when you’re asleep or at Nando’s or watching X Factor or wondering what to do now that your career has peaked at the age of 24.
Once you’ve bought a few houses, some Ferraris, and stocked the place with Krug at £2,000 a bottle, you’d find you still had tens of millions left and no clear idea what to do with it.

There you’d be, trapped in your gated mansion with hordes of fans and haters and paps at the end of the drive, genuinely wondering whether it mightn’t be an idea to get rid of the blasted money.

 So, because all the accountants and tax advisers in the world do exactly the opposite, here are a few ideas of how Gareth could blow that wad:

* Find a wine you like and share it. Medieval kings used to put booze in the fountains to keep the peasants happy, and Gareth‘s paypacket would buy 21,176,471 bottles of my favourite £4.25 75cl Soave. It takes about 88,000 bottles to fill up the tanks underneath Trafalgar Square, so we’d have enough to refill the tanks 240 times over, and put Scottish foam parties in the shade. CHEERS!

Pah! He could also show Scotland fans how it's done

* Four and a half million lapdances (or nine million somewhere cheaper). Doesn’t matter, you’d be bored rigid after the fifth one.

* He could pay for a year’s childcare at £200 per week, per child, for 8,653 youngsters, enabling their parents to work and restore the nation’s economy. But it’s a bit boring, which is why this sort of thing is best left to Nick Clegg.

* How about your very own Death Star? There’s enough iron on Earth to do the job, but unfortunately it would take 833,315 years to produce the steel and cost £541,261 trillion for raw materials. Better to invest in the Lego version, at £274.99, which sadly does not float or come with a forest moon. On the plus side, Gareth could buy 327,284 of them.

* If he was feeling public-spirited Gareth could build 651 yards of the HS2 rail network. At £80bn for 330 miles of track, it’s costing £242m a mile. The Government says, quite rightly, this “has the potential to shape the economic future of the UK”, without mentioning the future will be plughole-shaped. Still, Gareth would save some public money, and just have to hope the predicted investment returns of 200% are as shonky as they sound.

* If he really felt like it, Gareth could build a Cher army. It takes about £100,000 in reported eyelid surgery, rhinoplasty, facelifts, tummy tucks, liposuction and regular Botox to make a human being of 67 look like a gormless 22-year-old. Gareth can now afford to make 900 of them and have them all sing Turn Back Time on his own personal warship.

* Or he could splash out on a personal appearance from Lady Gaga. Every night. For more than three years. Stefani Germanotta charges over $100,000 – about £64,000 – to turn up. I predict by the fourth night he’d be pretending not to notice her, and frankly it would be nice if the rest of us could do the same.

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Real Madrid via Getty Images

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Gareth Bale's Unveiling at Real Madrid

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 * If classical is more Gareth’s thing he could help out Katherine Jenkins, who’s taken a pay cut for her new record deal. He can now afford to pay for 18 record deals for her, or perhaps he’d prefer to hire a Welsh male voice choir. At £500 a time, he can have 180,000 of them.

* How about a crown? Gareth’s daughter Alba is almost a year old, and should he want her to marry the new Prince George he will need to spend £30,000 a year on sending her to Marlborough School, and as much again on hair, skinny jeans, ski lessons, polo matches, and getting her into the same university as the prince. Still, the Middletons managed it and it probably came in at less than £2m. Gareth can afford to do the same for 18 daughters and wind up father-in-law to a future king.

* If he wants to just be ridiculous and answer an age-old question, Gareth could build an Olympic-sized swimming pool (£500,000 for an indoor one) and fill it with Skittles. I reckon it takes about four bags of Skittles to fill a bottle of wine, and at 2.5m litres in the pool it would take about 13m bags of Skittles. And obviously whole years of your life you’ll never get back.
Of course he won’t do any of that stuff.

It’ll get salted away and invested in property and shares and he’ll probably never see it.

 It’s not like he’ll get a pile of £50 notes to roll about on - he’ll just have a nice, shiny bank card and it’ll never, ever get refused.

Meanwhile, the money will grow, and grow, until one day Gareth will be dead and the money will be fought over by everyone he leaves behind.

George Best famously said, “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”

But he had more of a point than he realised, because after a certain level of wealth it doesn’t matter whether you give it to charity or spend it on a space rocket – you’re spending for the sake of it, because you can, squandering it because you just want to get rid.

It’s a lot of money, but £90m won’t cure Alzheimer’s, or end the war in Syria, or erase anyone’s national debt.

It’s too much to be of benefit to an individual and too little to be any use to the world, and consequently it’s little more than ridiculous.

But would I turn it down, in return for four mornings a week running about and a maximum of three hours’ work?
Probably not.

And therein you have the basic problem – we know it would be no good for us, we know we’d hate it in the end more than we enjoyed at first, and we still wouldn’t say no.

As it is, I’ll just be glad that it’s someone else’s problem and not mine.
If I were Gareth Bale, I think I’d sit down and weep.