Gareth Bale: From prize loser to the Real deal

London: As he contemplates becoming the most expensive footballer in the world, 24-year-old Gareth Bale would be forgiven for dwelling on how the fates could have easily led him in a different direction.

Just four years ago, the player whose services may well soon cost Real Madrid £100 million (Dh570 million) was making transfer headlines of a different kind. At the beginning of the 2009 season, the Welshman had played 24 matches for Tottenham Hotspur and had the grim distinction of not having finished on the winning side once — a record for any Premier League player. He had lost his place in the first team, at left-back, through injury and there seemed little chance of him regaining it in the foreseeable future.

His manager, Harry Redknapp, had privately admonished his “Jonah” for spending far too much time messing with his hair. He seemed by some accounts too frail to cope with the demands of Premier League football. A player who had once looked a prodigy worth around £10 million as a 17-year-old Southampton full-back, the youngest ever international for Wales already appeared, at 20, on the way down.

The tabloids were circling. A Daily Mail story had him heading not south with his Louis Vuittons packed to Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium, but north up the M1 with a holdall to relegation-haunted Birmingham City’s St Andrew’s: “Spurs flop Gareth could Bale out as Alex McLeish eyes £3 million defender.” Judging from the comments that accompanied that story (“Spurs had their pants pulled down when they bought him, he has been as big a flop as it is possible to be”), few fans would have seen that price as a bargain. Bale did not go to Birmingham, though, and while he was injured he instead, typically, focused on working hard to reinvent himself.

The transformation

The Cardiff-born player, a teetotaller whose father (and mentor) was a school caretaker, had always had a deep-rooted desire to make the very best of his talents. When he returned from injury later that season, it was as if Clark Kent had just emerged from a phone box.

In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Andy Murray, another athlete once dogged by suspicions of mental and corporeal frailty, Bale had transformed his physique in the gym. The floppy hair of his teenage years had been replaced with a cut that matched the new geometries of his body. He suddenly looked like one of those cigarette card footballers of the past, all tall boy shoulders and upturned collars, but with added 21st-century conditioning.

This was certainly the case as he humiliated the Brazilian Maicon in a Champions League match in 2010, in the match that established “Incredi-Bale” overnight on the sports pages throughout Europe. Four goals behind at half-time to the reigning European champions, Inter Milan, and reduced to 10 men by a sending-off, Spurs were inspired by Bale to a couldn’t-make-it-up comeback, with the player bullying Maicon (voted best defender in the world in the same season) out of the game and scoring a hat-trick. As Alex Ferguson, who had thought about signing Bale as a young player for Manchester United, subsequently remarked: “He had been a six-foot, gangly, slim boy; then all of a sudden he was built like a light heavyweight boxer.”

There is an irony in the fact that the model for this transformation seems to have been Cristiano Ronaldo, the player whose world record transfer fee (also paid by Real Madrid) Bale now seems likely to eclipse.

As the obsessive statisticians of Opta show, they have many similarities as players, particularly in their ability to create from nothing shooting opportunities for themselves and others. Bale, twice voted player of the year by his Premier League peers in the past three seasons, has perfected a particular free-kick technique originally identified with the Portuguese player, which sees the ball hit with power dip in the air viciously and late. It is notable that Bale lately has become twice as successful in scoring with it as his rival.

Such statistics will not have been lost on Florentino Perez, the Real Madrid president, who is so publicly determined to pair Ronaldo and Bale together this season. There are other numbers, however, that no doubt figure prominently in Perez’s calculations.

The Real president, who made his own millions in construction, before Spain’s property and banking crash, has built the foundations of his power on the “galactico” principle, attempting to cement Madrid’s status as the richest club in the world by buying in as many ready-made global superstars as possible.

The great global corporations of European football — those that sell replica shirts in their millions — play out their rivalries not only in the Champions League, but also in their abilities to attract fans from TV audiences in the most lucrative advertising markets of America and especially the far east.

Desperate bid

Madrid, in their ever more desperate efforts to eclipse their Catalan nemesis, Barcelona, have long since enjoyed beneficial relationships with several of the country’s national banks. That the move for Bale can be countenanced suggests such arrangements persist despite the country’s economic woes.

The prospective move, which, by all accounts, Bale is desperate to complete, despite Tottenham’s reluctance to negotiate, is being presented to the player by Madrid’s various ambassadors, the World Cup-winner Zinedine Zidane among them, as a now-or-never moment, a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

As Bale already knows from his short career, Birmingham-bound reject to Bernabeu’s most wanted, football’s wheel of fortune is never quite predictable. So far, on and off the field, from the moment he was spotted as an eight-year-old in a school match by a Southampton scout, he has proved able to take everything the game has put in his way in his formidable stride.

If Bale goes to Spain as the £100-million man, there is no doubt he will have the opportunity to run with the very best. Hiding will be more of a challenge, however.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd.