QUICKEST WAY TO BUY A NEW CAR
How many hours would you have to work to buy your car? The average wage in Ireland is €38,878, and let’s say you work a total of 230 eight-hour days a year (allowing for weekends and holidays). If you were to buy a Mini Cooper hatch for €22,150, you would have to work 63,475 minutes to pay for it.
It’s a little easier for Premier League footballers. Manchester United’s Serbian mid-fielder Nemanja Matic and Chelsea midfielder N’Golo Kanté both drive Mini Coopers – and it took them just 11 minutes of game time to pay for them.
Internet insurance comparison website Compare The Market has been crunching the numbers, based on gross salaries and car prices in the UK, and the results are astonishing. Tottenham Hotspur’s South Korean winger Son Heung-Min owns the most expensive car among all players, a Ferrari LaFerrari that cost £1,150,000 – and even at that he had to play for just 540 minutes to pay for it. That’s just six matches of 90 minutes each.
Manchester City’s Sergio Aguero bought his £270,000 Lamborghini Aventador in just 81 minutes; Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy bought a Bentley Continental GT Supersports (with a personalised J9 VDY numberplate) in 132 minutes, but Spurs’ Harry Kane bought the same car in just 66 minutes of play. The award for fastest buy, hardly surprisingly given the modesty of the car, goes to Bernardo Silva of Manchester City, who drives a £10,000 Smart ForTwo he paid for in just five minutes.
The survey also found that highly paid swashbuckling forwards are most likely to want really flash wheels (averaging £210,945), with the value of the cars owned dropping among midfielders (£132,571), defenders (£120,281) and goalkeepers (£111,525).
The moral of the story is simple. If you want to put the boot down, first get your boots on.