After two straight games when, despite being fit, he was left out of the squad, Gareth Bale was on the bench for Real Madrid’s final outing of the season against Real Betis. Picked instead by Zinédine Zidane on the wings were two teenagers: Vinícius Júnior, the Brazilian wunderkind, and Brahim Díaz, a January signing from Emirates Marketing Project.
Real lost 2-0, and Zidane sent on three attacking players. Not one was Bale. He was shown laughing on the bench with Toni Kroos, another unused substitute. At the final whistle, he embraced Betis’s fitness coach, Marcos Álvarez, who had worked with him at Tottenham Hotspur a decade ago, and disappeared down the tunnel.
Meanwhile, his team-mates gathered on the pitch to thank the fans who remained and received whistles and abuse to round off the club’s worst season in more than two decades.
The optics were not good. But then, they haven’t been for much of the season. And that’s part of the problem.
Bale is trapped in the classic gilded cage. He turns 30 in July and has three years to run on a contract that pays him more than £600,000 a week. You can count on one hand the clubs who could afford that wage. And, if you were to count the clubs who would happily commit £100 million over three seasons to Bale if they also had to pay a transfer fee, even a cut-rate one, then you would probably not put up any fingers at all.
That is because, for all his Champions League heroics on the way to helping the club lift the trophy on four occasions, Bale is perceived to be on the decline. Over the past four years, he has started just over half of Real’s league games. Some of it has been down to injury, some of it, especially this year, has been down to managerial choice. Both are problematic when it comes to convincing suitors that you are worth £30 million a season.
Much has been made of the club’s attitude towards Bale, as well as that of the fans and the media. He has been as fit as he has been in any season in the past five years, yet he will end the campaign with a mere eight league goals and few performances of note.
In a side who are perceived as successful, it is not a big deal. But Real have had three managers this year, while finishing 19 points behind Barcelona and getting bounced out of the Champions League in the round of 16, after a thorough humiliation by Ajax.
That sort of performance requires spacegoats. And when you are the best-paid player in the team, you will be in the firing line, though, contrary to popular belief, he has not been singled out: there was so much blame to go round that there was a herd of spacegoats.
Thus, we heard about his golf obsession, about how he did not like team-bonding dinners, about how he left one match early when he was an unused substitute and did not come on. The once-popular belief that he would flourish even more once he was out of Cristiano Ronaldo’s shadow was debunked, if not ridiculed, particularly when he chose the aftermath of last season’s Champions League final to moan about playing time and talk about a possible move.
The thing about Bale is that, statistically speaking, he has not declined drastically. He has 0.44 expected goals per game in all competitions — a system used to measure the likelihood of scoring from a particular position on the pitch — which is comparable to previous campaigns when they ranged from 0.43 to 0.55. His other metrics are stable, apart from the number of successful dribbles, which have halved from his debut season.
But these are the numbers of an outstanding footballer rather than one of the five best-paid players in the world. For that kind of money, you need a transformational player who can consistently carry a team and/or pack a major commercial punch. Though his cheerleaders will point to outstanding performances, particularly in cup competitions, the reality is that he does neither of those things.
The ball is in Bale’s court. He can sit, play golf, hope that Zidane changes his mind (or is replaced) and continue to watch the money roll in right up until his contract expires on the eve of his 33rd birthday. Or he can challenge himself, take less money elsewhere and possibly extend his career by moving.
The blueprint is provided by Arjen Robben. In the summer of 2009, after a stellar season, he was effectively forced out of Real, who had invested heavily in Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaká. He grudgingly accepted a move to Bayern Munich, taking a pay cut in exchange for a longer contract. He ended up staying for ten seasons, becoming a club legend and winning eight leagues titles.
Whether Real and Bale’s agent, Jonathan Barnett, can sell him that idea remains to be seen. They can remind him that he has only a few seasons left before his body, inevitably, starts to decline. And, if he wants to play football at the highest level, he may not be able to do it on his terms.
What is certain is that Real’s front line — with the potential additions of Luka Jovic from Eintracht Frankfurt and Eden Hazard from Chelsea — is not going to be any less cluttered next season. And they are unlikely to build a side around him in the way that they did with Ronaldo and the way that some thought they might do with him when the Portugal forward left a year ago.
