I imagine that Levy’s main interest in a ‘strategic partnership’ with Real has nothing to do with players, like so many believe after jumping to conclusions, and will be along the lines of learning the PR methods, business decisions, marketing techniques, sponsorship opportunities and commercial deals that mean they’re the most profitable club in the world by some distance, despite spending unbelievable amounts on playing staff.
How do you explain that to the fans? Do you want to announce to the world that you're learning marketting secrets from madrid? Do you want the press to know? Hell, do Real even want to let you tell people that?
I may be speculating but is it a coincidence that a year after we went into this deal, one of our players has had so much media exposure - he was in the middle of times square ffs – that you can’t walk past a billboard without his face on it and that he’s being talked about in the same bracket as Ronaldo and Messi despite being a clearly inferior player to those two (not a slur in itself but he’s nowhere near them, imo)? I don’t think so, as we’ve had exciting, talented and prolific players before (keane and berbatov) that got nowhere near that level of exposure. He became a Galactico while he was at our club, at the same sort of level that Beckham and Ronaldo reached and with far more marketting exposure than any of ****'s individual 'invincibles' managed; more than Gerrard Rooney etc.
Obviously Bale is a lot more marketable himself than either Keane or Berbatov were, but still, the order of magnitude between how highly they (and modric) were thought of in the press and the sponsorship deals they got, and what we’ve seen from bale in the last 8 months (and it really is the last 8 months, as of last summer to the world media he was the really fast one who scored some great goals against Inter, but 4-5 months ago he started to be seen absolutely everywhere) is quite something.
Levy wants to take spurs from being realistically the 6th biggest in the country, to the biggest, and how better to do that than by learning from a club which is by far and away the most successful at monetizing its success in the world. Sure you can argue that it’s down to write offs by princes or ludicrous tv contracts but over the last 10 years Real have also made obscene amounts by taking advantage of the images of their players and merchandising.
Yeah we’ve sold them our best two players over the past year, but its not like we gave them away cheaply; if RM weren’t in for Modric when he wanted to leave how much do people think we would have got for him given he had been desperate to go for over a year? Most people agreed they’d rather he go to Madrid than Chelsea or Man U at the time. Who would have believed that we’d get a WR fee for Bale 6 months ago? Even when he was repeatedly winning matches for us single handedly the most fanatical of spurs fans would have struggled rationalising how he was worth 4 RVP’s, 2.5 Modric’s and more than a Ronaldo who had just scored 36 odd goals to win ManU the league. I could understand the petition and general anger if we'd sold them below market prices but we didn't, we took them for every penny.
That's the thing here - the natural order of things was maintained, a big rich club came in for a star player, we didn't want to sell so they unsettled them, we were left in a tough position but made the best of it and drove a hard bargain. We don't like it when it happens to us but in turn we went and took the star players from roma, ajax, twente etc. whether it's by taking advantage of their contract situation, our dofs knowledge of their situation or just our financial and historical clout, just as Madrid used their appeal, press and agent power. That's football and happens regardless of any special relationship.
Sure we’d like to keep our best players but as we saw with Carrick, Berbatov and Keane, it doesn’t require Madrid to be involved for us to lose them, yet with them involved we don’t have to face them in the league twice a year and we get even more money.
Thanks to selling Bale to Madrid we’ve now got two young potentially world class replacements in Eriksen and Lamela who could well become just as valuable if they reach their potential alongside some luck and good marketing, a Brazilan first team box to box player in Paulinho, a proven goalscorer in Soldado and a number of other quality squad players, without spending a penny of any potentially earmarked transfer budget.
Contrast that to if Man U were interested in the fergie era, we’d have realistically lost him for £30-£35m and replaced him with Ince and McCarthy, and got one of their youngsters on loan. I’m not even being facetious – we clearly had an agreement to delay the transfer till we’d concluded our business and while we repeatedly stated we were spending independently of Bale, to avoid being quoted excessive fees, and they agreed to it. We took them for £85m and made them shut up while we did it. They even started claiming we weren't agreeing to stuff in the press the week beforehand to further muddy the waters - stirring, or helping us to tie up Eriksen for the bargain price of 11m and lamela for 25m+add ons?
Yeah the Ozil sale is maddening but this is what Real do, they probably sell too few shirts with his name on the back so didn’t want to keep him regardless of how good he is, and **** were the only ones who could pay the fee, the wages and get the deal done quickly enough. You’d think they’d have learnt from Mackele that selling key team members because they’re not as fashionable as your new recruits will backfire but with Perez in charge common sense just doesn’t factor into it!
I have no doubt that if they were willing to sell we would have enquired but if Levy, Baldini and AVB either couldn’t make the deal work, sell the project to Ozil or decided Eriksen is a better buy for the money then sod it, they’ve done enough this transfer window to earn my trust regardless of what the gooners do; we’ve still strengthened the essential areas of our squad more than any other team aside from City, and are world class fullbacks, a motivated Ade away from being largely complete, despite, or possible because of, reals infatuation with bale.
