Part 1 of Gareth Bale
It was approaching 7 o’clock on a Thursday night and the constant queue along from Tower A at the Estadio Bernabeu was at last beginning to dwindle. There were still some souls shuffling in 35C heat as they bought tickets for the last tours of the day at the storied stadium.
Spanish fans mixed with foreign tourists and once inside, at the top of Tower B, their exclamations were in a series of languages. They all told of the same response to the panorama in front of them: this is Real Madrid, epic, majestic Real Madrid. Fifa’s club of the 20th century.
Down on the immaculate surface four groundsmen pushed lawnmowers. It looked like synchronised swimming.
The new pitch, fresh turf brought in each summer in 21 refrigerated lorries from Avila, was being prepared for the first home game of Real’s season. Some 81,000 empty seats shone in the steepling stands as a neon sign flashed and declared: ‘Feel A Part of Real Madrid!’ In the busy club shop, people buy a part of it. The window display – written in English – reads: ‘If You Demand Glory’.
And there on the left of three photographs of Real players, staring back over his shoulder, serious and unsmiling in his white jersey, is Gareth Bale. In the shop window.
For many departing fans, this is the last scene.
Bale, however, had already appeared several times. In Real’s visual introduction to the club, Bale’s bicycle-kick wonder strike in the 2018 Champions League final against Liverpool is the first goal shown – the first goal of a club 117 years old. It still provokes awed gasps.
Bale also appears in footage in the club’s museum – he has after all won four Champions Leagues in six years at Real Madrid. In the shop an advert, again in English, says ‘Personalise Your Jersey on the 1st floor’, and it has Bale with his No 11 on. Bale is a part of Real Madrid.
And then there is the home dressing room. This being modern football, players don’t simply have lockers, Real’s players have a huge photograph of each player on his door and the torso of a mannequin in his shirt above it. The order is numerical, so that when Zinedine Zidane looks across to give instructions he sees Toni Kroos beside Karim Benzema beside Luka Modric beside Bale beside Marcelo. It would give a coach some confidence.
Forty-eight hours later Zidane and his players are back in that dressing room following an underwhelming 1-1 draw against Real Valladolid, who finished 16th last season.
Karim Benzema had given Madrid a late lead but a man with the surname Guardiola – Sergi – scored an even later equaliser. Valladolid deserved their point and in the directors’ box the original Ronaldo could be seen beaming. He bought a controlling stake in visiting club last September.
As the Real players sloped off, though, following a performance that began optimistically, then petered out, it was the other Ronaldo who was again relevant.
Cristiano Ronaldo scored 451 goals in 438 appearances for Madrid, then left for Juventus last summer. Those figures – never the mind the force of personality he brought to the pitch and into the mind of opponents – make him irreplaceable. Ronaldo left a hole even bigger than his ego.
A club has to cope with heroes’ exits and in Ronaldo’s absence there was a hope, an expectation, that Bale would move physically and emotionally into that space.
It has not happened – yet. Bale has scored one goal at the Bernabeu in the past 12 months.
In April, with Real eliminated from the Champions League, out of contention for La Liga and dismissed from the Copa del Rey by Barcelona, Bale’s introduction as a second half substitute against Athletic Bilbao was greeted with whistles and jeers. Valladolid was his first home appearance since then.
A player for whom Real broke the world transfer record when they paid Tottenham £85 million in 2013 had become peripheral. He had got lost somewhere in that great white shirt. Always so vivid in the red of Wales, Bale was pale in white, a ghost Galactico. The fans had lost patience and so had the club. Bale was in the shop window.
A man apart, last month on the club’s American tour Zidane said of Bale: “We hope he leaves soon; it would be best for everyone.”
It was brutal. Zidane added: “I have nothing personal against him, but there comes a time where things are done because they must be done. I have to make decisions. We have to change.”
Such comments in any workplace sting. But Bale is contracted to June 2022.
Zidane and the club thought then that Bale could be sold to Chinese club Beijing Guoan. This would have the triple benefit of not selling to a European rival, bringing in upwards of £20 million while removing Bale’s colossal wages from the books and appeasing Zidane, who has walked away once before.
It did not happen. Then on tour Real lost 7-3 to Atletico Madrid in New York.
Suddenly Real Madrid were reminded of the post-Ronaldo vulnerabilities which saw them lose 12 times in La Liga last season. Yet when Real came back to Europe and faced Bale’s former club, Tottenham, in Munich on July 30, Bale was missing. He was photographed playing golf in Boadilla del Monte on the outskirts of Madrid.
This is the 90th anniversary of La Liga and the marketing slogan is: ‘No es futbol. Es La Liga.’
Real Madrid’s season began with a trip to Celta Vigo. On the teamsheet was Gareth Bale. This was 26 days on from Zidane’s statement that Bale should leave the club. After 12 minutes a Bale thrust teed up Benzema. It was 1-0 and despite Modric being sent off, Real won 3-1. In some quarters Bale was man-of-the-match.
With the move to China scuppered by the Beijing club’s apparent reluctance to part with a transfer fee, and with no other offers forthcoming for a player who turned 30 in July and earns £600,000 a week (before tax), with Madrid President Florentino Perez having to balance finances, internal politics, squad numbers and Zidane, Bale had been re-instated.
“Poor results and play in pre-season, combined with a lack of offers from elsewhere, have led to this reconciliation,” said sports daily Marca.
Moreover, with new signings Eden Hazard injured and Luka Jovic left on the bench, Bale was not just part of the squad again, he was part of the team. “Reactivated”, was the word captain Sergio Ramos was to use.
In Vigo, Bale played as if his battery had been recharged, and the match was being shown on the TV screens at Real’s vast training base at Valdebebas before Zidane next spoke.
It is an indication of last season’s slump, the Galactico culture born under Perez and Neymar’s situation at Paris Saint-Germain that when Zidane enters the room at 12.08pm he is talking about Neymar at 12.10pm. A perception is that Real, the team, need Neymar, and so does Real, the club.
Zidane has a weary smile. “I want September 2 to come as soon as possible so these questions will end,” he says.
September 2 is when the European transfer window closes.
After a while the subject moves onto Bale and what has changed since the coach said he wanted him out.
“What’s changed,” Zidane says, “is that the player is going to stay, nothing else.”
So everything, then.
“The important thing is that the player wants to stay,” Zidane adds. “And we will count on him. He has shown he is a big player, and he must show again the player that he is.”
The next morning these words are reported in AS under the headline ‘Juicio A Bale’: ‘Bale goes on trial’. It is on the front page.
Inside AS speculate on the reconciliation and if it is “fleeting or lasting . . . forced or genuine.” Whether Bale pays attention to Spain’s sports newspapers is unknown but it illustrates the tone of the debate around him and his place at Real Madrid.
And this is the great Real-Bale paradox: at a club whose museum is like a giant trophy cabinet, which measures itself in silverware, particularly those 13 European Cups, Bale has won four Champions League titles – against Atletico Madrid in 2014, against the same opponents in 2016, against Juventus in 2017 and Liverpool in 2018.
In two of those finals, in 2014 and 2018, Bale scored decisive goals. Against Liverpool it was the jaw-dropping bicycle kick (see below) to make it 2-1 which, as stated, Real replay to demonstrate their splendour.
In the first final against Atletico it was Bale’s header in extra-time that took the game away from Diego Simeone’s team; in the second Bale scored in the penalty shoot-out won by Real.
Add the La Liga title in 2016-17, plus the 2014 Copa del Rey — when Bale scored his astonishing on-the-pitch, off-the-pitch, on-the-pitch-again toe-poke winner against a Barcelona team containing Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Neymar and Lionel Messi — plus other things such as Super Cups, and when it comes to laying medals on the table Gareth Bale has a stronger hand than any other British player who has ever moved abroad.
And yet.
As David Alvarez of El Pais says at half-time in the Valladolid match: “It’s a puzzle.”
Shortly before kick-off Bale had run towards the touchline where Real’s Ultras gather. He was met with applause. He returned the compliment. The he ran across to the far touchline. Again he was applauded. Again he responded. He was back.
Then, as Alvarez notes, in the third minute Bale sped past his man and the ground hummed.
“You heard it, every time he’s touched the ball today there’s been this sound, this murmur of excitement,” Alvarez says, “which was very different from the last time he played here against Athletic Bilbao. People really wanted him out then. But there’s been a conversion. Now people want him to succeed.”
As the game wore on, Bale was neither poor nor brilliant. You could sense this air of anticipation, but he had not shown again the player that he is. This is a match Ronaldo would have ensured Real won.
“Everybody expected Bale to step up last season, he made people think that after Kiev,” Alvarez says. “And he didn’t. But people have been expecting him to do that for the last six years. They really want it to happen. It never does.”
There have been periods, however, when this has not been the dominant opinion. When Bale signed his contract extension in October 2016, the club inserted a buy-out clause of €1 billion. The great Emilio Butragueno, a senior figure in the administration, declared: “You’re a fundamental man for us.”
Aside from the Champions League goals, there was the lauded ‘BBC’ – Bale, Benzema and Cristiano. In his first season at the Bernabeu, Bale scored 22 goals including a hat-trick against Valladolid. The only Briton to score a La Liga hat-trick until then was Gary Lineker.
“Gareth is doing an incredible job,” Cristiano Ronaldo said after that match.
Back then, Real and Perez must have hoped that Bale, playing in a league which has provided the last ten winners of the Ballon D’or, would join Ronaldo, Messi and Modric. Here was a supreme individual talent. Bale was voted ninth in his first season and sixth in 2016, but he was not in the top 20 a year later and was 17th in 2018.
There appears to be a tactical issue. In 2010, when he was 21 and making those cannonball runs which devastated Inter Milan, then champions of Europe, Bale was Tottenham’s left-sided midfielder. His hat-trick at San Siro was scored on the run.
Real swooned, but in La Liga matches at the Bernabeu, Bale is running into five-yard spaces and compressed defences.
Alvarez accepts this but adds: “It’s both on and off the pitch. On the pitch he’s correct, but sometimes when things go bad he doesn’t step up and people feel he should. Then the injuries, they haven’t helped at all.
“Off the pitch he’s never tried to give back the warmth that sometimes he gets. He doesn’t give back. Then there’s the language thing.”
Bale’s unwillingness to speak Spanish publicly has left the Madrid media waiting, and increasingly peeved, for a few years. When he arrived he took lessons and made an effort, but as many do, Bale found learning a new language difficult and as time passed perhaps inhibitions surfaced. There may have been times when, even in games, he has retreated into himself.
There are some in Madrid who would say this is a generous assessment.
Spanish fans mixed with foreign tourists and once inside, at the top of Tower B, their exclamations were in a series of languages. They all told of the same response to the panorama in front of them: this is Real Madrid, epic, majestic Real Madrid. Fifa’s club of the 20th century.
Down on the immaculate surface four groundsmen pushed lawnmowers. It looked like synchronised swimming.
The new pitch, fresh turf brought in each summer in 21 refrigerated lorries from Avila, was being prepared for the first home game of Real’s season. Some 81,000 empty seats shone in the steepling stands as a neon sign flashed and declared: ‘Feel A Part of Real Madrid!’ In the busy club shop, people buy a part of it. The window display – written in English – reads: ‘If You Demand Glory’.
And there on the left of three photographs of Real players, staring back over his shoulder, serious and unsmiling in his white jersey, is Gareth Bale. In the shop window.
For many departing fans, this is the last scene.
Bale, however, had already appeared several times. In Real’s visual introduction to the club, Bale’s bicycle-kick wonder strike in the 2018 Champions League final against Liverpool is the first goal shown – the first goal of a club 117 years old. It still provokes awed gasps.
Bale also appears in footage in the club’s museum – he has after all won four Champions Leagues in six years at Real Madrid. In the shop an advert, again in English, says ‘Personalise Your Jersey on the 1st floor’, and it has Bale with his No 11 on. Bale is a part of Real Madrid.
And then there is the home dressing room. This being modern football, players don’t simply have lockers, Real’s players have a huge photograph of each player on his door and the torso of a mannequin in his shirt above it. The order is numerical, so that when Zinedine Zidane looks across to give instructions he sees Toni Kroos beside Karim Benzema beside Luka Modric beside Bale beside Marcelo. It would give a coach some confidence.
Forty-eight hours later Zidane and his players are back in that dressing room following an underwhelming 1-1 draw against Real Valladolid, who finished 16th last season.
Karim Benzema had given Madrid a late lead but a man with the surname Guardiola – Sergi – scored an even later equaliser. Valladolid deserved their point and in the directors’ box the original Ronaldo could be seen beaming. He bought a controlling stake in visiting club last September.
As the Real players sloped off, though, following a performance that began optimistically, then petered out, it was the other Ronaldo who was again relevant.
Cristiano Ronaldo scored 451 goals in 438 appearances for Madrid, then left for Juventus last summer. Those figures – never the mind the force of personality he brought to the pitch and into the mind of opponents – make him irreplaceable. Ronaldo left a hole even bigger than his ego.
A club has to cope with heroes’ exits and in Ronaldo’s absence there was a hope, an expectation, that Bale would move physically and emotionally into that space.
It has not happened – yet. Bale has scored one goal at the Bernabeu in the past 12 months.
In April, with Real eliminated from the Champions League, out of contention for La Liga and dismissed from the Copa del Rey by Barcelona, Bale’s introduction as a second half substitute against Athletic Bilbao was greeted with whistles and jeers. Valladolid was his first home appearance since then.
A player for whom Real broke the world transfer record when they paid Tottenham £85 million in 2013 had become peripheral. He had got lost somewhere in that great white shirt. Always so vivid in the red of Wales, Bale was pale in white, a ghost Galactico. The fans had lost patience and so had the club. Bale was in the shop window.
A man apart, last month on the club’s American tour Zidane said of Bale: “We hope he leaves soon; it would be best for everyone.”
It was brutal. Zidane added: “I have nothing personal against him, but there comes a time where things are done because they must be done. I have to make decisions. We have to change.”
Such comments in any workplace sting. But Bale is contracted to June 2022.
Zidane and the club thought then that Bale could be sold to Chinese club Beijing Guoan. This would have the triple benefit of not selling to a European rival, bringing in upwards of £20 million while removing Bale’s colossal wages from the books and appeasing Zidane, who has walked away once before.
It did not happen. Then on tour Real lost 7-3 to Atletico Madrid in New York.
Suddenly Real Madrid were reminded of the post-Ronaldo vulnerabilities which saw them lose 12 times in La Liga last season. Yet when Real came back to Europe and faced Bale’s former club, Tottenham, in Munich on July 30, Bale was missing. He was photographed playing golf in Boadilla del Monte on the outskirts of Madrid.
This is the 90th anniversary of La Liga and the marketing slogan is: ‘No es futbol. Es La Liga.’
Real Madrid’s season began with a trip to Celta Vigo. On the teamsheet was Gareth Bale. This was 26 days on from Zidane’s statement that Bale should leave the club. After 12 minutes a Bale thrust teed up Benzema. It was 1-0 and despite Modric being sent off, Real won 3-1. In some quarters Bale was man-of-the-match.
With the move to China scuppered by the Beijing club’s apparent reluctance to part with a transfer fee, and with no other offers forthcoming for a player who turned 30 in July and earns £600,000 a week (before tax), with Madrid President Florentino Perez having to balance finances, internal politics, squad numbers and Zidane, Bale had been re-instated.
“Poor results and play in pre-season, combined with a lack of offers from elsewhere, have led to this reconciliation,” said sports daily Marca.
Moreover, with new signings Eden Hazard injured and Luka Jovic left on the bench, Bale was not just part of the squad again, he was part of the team. “Reactivated”, was the word captain Sergio Ramos was to use.
In Vigo, Bale played as if his battery had been recharged, and the match was being shown on the TV screens at Real’s vast training base at Valdebebas before Zidane next spoke.
It is an indication of last season’s slump, the Galactico culture born under Perez and Neymar’s situation at Paris Saint-Germain that when Zidane enters the room at 12.08pm he is talking about Neymar at 12.10pm. A perception is that Real, the team, need Neymar, and so does Real, the club.
Zidane has a weary smile. “I want September 2 to come as soon as possible so these questions will end,” he says.
September 2 is when the European transfer window closes.
After a while the subject moves onto Bale and what has changed since the coach said he wanted him out.
“What’s changed,” Zidane says, “is that the player is going to stay, nothing else.”
So everything, then.
“The important thing is that the player wants to stay,” Zidane adds. “And we will count on him. He has shown he is a big player, and he must show again the player that he is.”
The next morning these words are reported in AS under the headline ‘Juicio A Bale’: ‘Bale goes on trial’. It is on the front page.
Inside AS speculate on the reconciliation and if it is “fleeting or lasting . . . forced or genuine.” Whether Bale pays attention to Spain’s sports newspapers is unknown but it illustrates the tone of the debate around him and his place at Real Madrid.
And this is the great Real-Bale paradox: at a club whose museum is like a giant trophy cabinet, which measures itself in silverware, particularly those 13 European Cups, Bale has won four Champions League titles – against Atletico Madrid in 2014, against the same opponents in 2016, against Juventus in 2017 and Liverpool in 2018.
In two of those finals, in 2014 and 2018, Bale scored decisive goals. Against Liverpool it was the jaw-dropping bicycle kick (see below) to make it 2-1 which, as stated, Real replay to demonstrate their splendour.
In the first final against Atletico it was Bale’s header in extra-time that took the game away from Diego Simeone’s team; in the second Bale scored in the penalty shoot-out won by Real.
Add the La Liga title in 2016-17, plus the 2014 Copa del Rey — when Bale scored his astonishing on-the-pitch, off-the-pitch, on-the-pitch-again toe-poke winner against a Barcelona team containing Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Neymar and Lionel Messi — plus other things such as Super Cups, and when it comes to laying medals on the table Gareth Bale has a stronger hand than any other British player who has ever moved abroad.
And yet.
As David Alvarez of El Pais says at half-time in the Valladolid match: “It’s a puzzle.”
Shortly before kick-off Bale had run towards the touchline where Real’s Ultras gather. He was met with applause. He returned the compliment. The he ran across to the far touchline. Again he was applauded. Again he responded. He was back.
Then, as Alvarez notes, in the third minute Bale sped past his man and the ground hummed.
“You heard it, every time he’s touched the ball today there’s been this sound, this murmur of excitement,” Alvarez says, “which was very different from the last time he played here against Athletic Bilbao. People really wanted him out then. But there’s been a conversion. Now people want him to succeed.”
As the game wore on, Bale was neither poor nor brilliant. You could sense this air of anticipation, but he had not shown again the player that he is. This is a match Ronaldo would have ensured Real won.
“Everybody expected Bale to step up last season, he made people think that after Kiev,” Alvarez says. “And he didn’t. But people have been expecting him to do that for the last six years. They really want it to happen. It never does.”
There have been periods, however, when this has not been the dominant opinion. When Bale signed his contract extension in October 2016, the club inserted a buy-out clause of €1 billion. The great Emilio Butragueno, a senior figure in the administration, declared: “You’re a fundamental man for us.”
Aside from the Champions League goals, there was the lauded ‘BBC’ – Bale, Benzema and Cristiano. In his first season at the Bernabeu, Bale scored 22 goals including a hat-trick against Valladolid. The only Briton to score a La Liga hat-trick until then was Gary Lineker.
“Gareth is doing an incredible job,” Cristiano Ronaldo said after that match.
Back then, Real and Perez must have hoped that Bale, playing in a league which has provided the last ten winners of the Ballon D’or, would join Ronaldo, Messi and Modric. Here was a supreme individual talent. Bale was voted ninth in his first season and sixth in 2016, but he was not in the top 20 a year later and was 17th in 2018.
There appears to be a tactical issue. In 2010, when he was 21 and making those cannonball runs which devastated Inter Milan, then champions of Europe, Bale was Tottenham’s left-sided midfielder. His hat-trick at San Siro was scored on the run.
Real swooned, but in La Liga matches at the Bernabeu, Bale is running into five-yard spaces and compressed defences.
Alvarez accepts this but adds: “It’s both on and off the pitch. On the pitch he’s correct, but sometimes when things go bad he doesn’t step up and people feel he should. Then the injuries, they haven’t helped at all.
“Off the pitch he’s never tried to give back the warmth that sometimes he gets. He doesn’t give back. Then there’s the language thing.”
Bale’s unwillingness to speak Spanish publicly has left the Madrid media waiting, and increasingly peeved, for a few years. When he arrived he took lessons and made an effort, but as many do, Bale found learning a new language difficult and as time passed perhaps inhibitions surfaced. There may have been times when, even in games, he has retreated into himself.
There are some in Madrid who would say this is a generous assessment.
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