Cristiano Ronaldo: The $107 Million Man

By: Bob | April 12th, 2007

If you are wondering how you will spend your European football-free days in June the answer is becoming pretty clear. You will spend hours reading about how much Real Madrid covets Cristiano Ronaldo and how much Manchester United doesn’t want to let him go. The story has been playing for months now and it undoubtedly will be the main headline once the summer transfer window opens up.

Numbers are often a baffling thing to me, especially when you are talking about monetary figures with nine numbers. According to the The Guardian, Real Madrid are willing to pony up $107 million to pry CR7 away from Man Yoo. That is £54m, €80m or $27,713,029,960 Zimbabwean dollars just for the right to bring the crossover to the Bernabeu. Then they would have to pay him a weekly salary in the neighborhood of £140,000 (48,819,347 Yemeni Rial).

Those numbers are boggling but so is the rise of Cristiano Ronaldo. It is hard to imagine that he is just 22. It seems like he has been playing for a decade. There is no denying that he is one of the best in the world today. There is also no denying that no human being should ever be worth that much money, but in this crazy world of ours he apparently is and he might turn out to be a wise investment for Real Madrid.

How does the £54m transfer fee compare to past transfers? Here are the highest transfer fees in pounds to date according to Wikipedia.

1 Zinedine Zidane – Juventus to Real Madrid 45.62
2 Luís Figo – Barcelona to Real Madrid 38.7
3 Hernán Crespo – Parma to Lazio 35.5
4 Gianluigi Buffon – Parma to Juventus 32.6
5 Christian Vieri – Lazio to Internazionale 32.0
6 Andriy Shevchenko – AC Milan to Chelsea 30.0
7 Rio Ferdinand – Leeds United to Manchester United 29.1
8 Gaizka Mendieta – Valencia to Lazio 29.0
9 Ronaldo – Internazionale to Real Madrid 28.49
10 Juan Sebastián Verón – Lazio to Manchester United 28

The one name that really stands out on that list is Gaizka Mendieta. He’s scored only 8 goals since that transfer back in 2001 or three million pounds per goal.