Can Gareth Bale help fix Real?
With Real Madrid under pressure to continue their Champions League-winning hot streak, last season’s final hero is ready to prove he can become Los Blancos’ ultimate Galactico
We visit the man charged with replacing Ronaldo at Madrid
As the smell of barbecued fish – lunch for the throng of camera crews present for a precision-scheduled media day – wafts into the room, Fourfourtwo is a little perturbed.
This, to be frank, doesn’t feel like the ideal scent to act as the backdrop to an interview.
“I have to admit, I’m not a big fish guy,” chuckles Gareth Bale as the Real Madrid superstar greets us. That may well be the case, but with two notable figureheads from Los Blancos’ recent three-peat of Champions League successes departing during the summer, the onus is now on Bale to prove he’s ready to become the biggest fish in the grandest pond. There’s a clamour for the Welshman to make himself the new king of the Galacticos, continue the club’s European hot streak and secure his place among the pantheon of the game’s most iconic players. No pressure, Gareth...
FFT has been to the finest training grounds Europe has to offer, but in terms of sheer scale, none of them even come close to Real Madrid’s Ciudad facility, located in the Valdebebas suburb to the north-east of the Spanish capital. This is a venue befitting the most decorated team in European football, and the most famous club in the world.
The 140-acre site boasts 12 full-size football pitches, a strength and rehabilitation centre, treatment rooms, a hydrotherapy centre, various media facilities and, at the heart of it all, Estadio Alfredo Di Stefano – the 6,000-seater stadium that hosts the reserve team, Castilla.
It’s there, deep in the bowels of the arena, where we meet the man who won this most storied of clubs the latest of its 13 European Cups. A man who, in his first five seasons with Los Blancos after completing a €100 million transfer from Tottenham in 2007, won four Champions League titles – three of them coming in the last three campaigns.
Quite a lot has changed in the four years since FFT last met Gareth Bale, when he told us how he’d adapted to life in Spain with the help of his new team-mates (and being able to buy imported baked beans at his local supermarket).
These days, every Tom, Dick and Jadon is making the move from the Premier League to Europe. But as recently as five and a half years ago, a high-profile British youngster moving abroad was still something of a rarity, with the vast majority opting to stay in familiar surroundings. Instead, the Welshman relished the chance to leap from his comfort zone and make Madrid his home.
“I’m very settled here now and so are my family,” Bale says with the self-assured manner of a guy who has lifted more Champions League trophies than any British club bar Liverpool. “I’m happy, I’m enjoying playing football and I’m enjoying winning trophies.”
That’s not to say there haven’t been a few teething troubles along the way – particularly in the days immediately after his departure from north London – but Bale has soldiered on.
“The first couple of years in a new country are always a bit difficult,” he admits. “Life here is a little different to home, but you get used to the different culture and learn to appreciate and enjoy it.
“The food in Spain is amazing. We eat out quite a lot, and there are a few restaurants we really like. I love the jamon, and the steaks here are fantastic too.
“In terms of the rest of my routine, I try to replicate what I’m used to from back home, so actually, the biggest difference for me now is that games kick off so late in the day. Almost all of the matches are evening kick-offs – sometimes 9.30pm or 10pm – and I often find it difficult to sleep afterwards.”
With all of that energy and adrenaline coursing through him late at night, has Bale adopted at least one local custom?
“I’m not really one for a siesta,” he chuckles. “A lot of the other lads do, but if I sleep in the day I sleep even less at night!”
Afternoon naps may not be on Bale’s post-training agenda, but golf certainly is. As we arrive, Bale and his entourage are exchanging a few jokes about a recent round, and he even tells FFT that one of his life’s ambitions is to get a hole in one. “I’ve come close a couple of times, but not close enough,” he sighs, wistfully. “You need a little bit of luck.”
While the Welshman’s golfing dreams are yet to come true in Spain, he’s been able to make even his wildest footballing fantasies a reality.
By the end of his first campaign with Los Blancos, he’d established himself as an integral figure at the Bernabeu by scoring two crucial goals in finals.
Bale stepped up and sealed victory over Barcelona in the Copa del Rey final, with Ronaldo watching on from the sidelines, before inspiring them to Champions League glory against neighbours Atletico Madrid.
Bale’s 85th-minute stunner in the domestic cup final was a genuine breakthrough moment, showcasing his near-unique blend of speed, power and technique as he burned past Marc Bartra on the left flank before prodding the ball beyond goalkeeper Jose Pinto.
Just over a month later, with the first-ever cross-city European Cup final having gone into extra time, Bale nodded home what proved to be the decisive goal after then-atleti custodian Thibaut Courtois had parried Angel Di Maria’s powerful strike. Marcelo and Ronaldo added late gloss in a 4-1 triumph that finally ended the club’s 12-year wait for ‘La Decima’ – their 10th crown.
It’s safe to say Bale hit the ground running on the pitch. If he’d been apprehensive about the change of scenery, he needn’t have worried – especially with gold medals from a La Liga title, three more European Cups, one Spanish Super Cup, two UEFA Super Cups and three FIFA Club World Cups promptly placed around his neck.
“I don’t think there was much that surprised me about the Spanish game, I guess mostly because I’d watched so much of it on TV before I moved here,” he says nonchalantly. “It’s more technical here, more of a passing game, whereas you’d probably say the Premier League is more physically demanding.
“That experience of a more physical game, and having the physical attributes that I’ve developed over the years, have given me a bit of an edge since I joined Real.
“I wanted to come to Spain to progress my game further. In England I was very raw, powerful and explosive, but when you come here you have to learn a slightly different style. I feel like I’m still improving as a player every day, and that I’ve become a more complete footballer.”
As that development has continued in Spain, Bale has kept one eye on the game in Blighty. Having vast experience of top-level football in both England and Spain, Bale is well placed to compare the divisions. He’s emphatic in highlighting the area in which he thinks the Premier League is lagging behind – and it will delight newspaper columnists and radio phone-in hosts back home.
“They have to bring in a winter break,” the 29-year-old responds in a flash, before extolling the virtues of some rest and relaxation time midway through a season. Bale insists it makes a big difference when preparing to dive head-first into the ‘business end’ of a campaign.
“It really helps us to have a couple of weeks off at a time when the Premier League teams are cramming in six games,” he explains. “By the end of a season you feel the difference, and you feel that little bit fresher. It’s important mentally to be able to disconnect from football for a week in the middle of a long, hard season. I think it would really help Premier League sides in Europe, but you know what it’s like there in terms of the importance of TV rights money – it’s just not going to happen, is it?”
He’s probably right, but to illustrate the difference, consider the fact Real Madrid didn’t play between December 22 and January 3, during which time his former team, Spurs, played four league fixtures with injuries mounting all the while.
“The Premier League is unique in terms of the way the fans support their teams,” adds Bale. “Every stadium has a massive atmosphere – there’s usually a lot of singing. Here, there are some singing sections but other parts of the stadiums can be pretty quiet. The culture isn’t for fans to go to away games – it’s a bigger country – so there’s often not many away supporters.”
Naturally, though, Real Madrid’s fans quickly snapped up the 12,800 tickets available for May’s trip to the Champions League final in Kiev. And they weren’t about to be disappointed.
The 2017-18 campaign didn’t start particularly well for Gareth Bale or Real Madrid. He may have scored Los Blancos’ first goal of the La Liga season – the opener in a 3-0 win at Deportivo La Coruna – but things soon began to unravel. Calf and hamstring problems restricted Bale to just three substitute appearances in the three months from late September. Frustratingly, the initial calf twang came just days after he’d swept home a superb Champions League volley at Borussia Dortmund, which had looked like kick-starting his and the club’s season. Injury also denied Bale the chance of a reunion with his former club in the same competition. He missed both group games against Spurs and his team-mates twice failed to win in his absence, drawing 1-1 in Madrid before losing 3-1 at Wembley. “That was difficult, but there are some things you can’t control,” he says, reflecting on this frustrating period. Worse was to come, when 2017 ended with a humbling 3-0 home defeat to Barcelona, Bale unable to turn the tide having been thrown into the action as a 72nd-minute substitute. That result left Madrid languishing in 4th place in La Liga, a huge 19 points behind the Catalans at the season’s halfway point. The league title was already a lost cause, but when you’re Real Madrid, that isn’t necessarily the be all and end all – there was still a third consecutive Champions League crown to play for. The champions of France, Italy and Germany (Paris Saint-germain, Juventus and Bayern Munich) were dispatched in the knockout stages as Madrid marched to a third final in as many years. During this time, Bale had recovered both fitness and form, ending the league season with 16 goals and two assists in 26 matches. After an ankle problem reduced the Welshman to a cameo role in the previous year’s showpiece in his hometown Cardiff, Bale was absolutely gagging to grab this final – against Liverpool – by the scruff of the neck. “I’d been playing pretty well since coming back from the last little niggle I’d had in December,” he states. “I scored five goals in my last four league games of the season and felt like I deserved to be involved from the start.” But coach Zinedine Zidane had other ideas, deciding to deploy Isco behind a front two of Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo. Bale was livid. “I was really frustrated not to start,” says Bale, assertively. He had to bide his time once again. He watched Mohamed Salah leave the field early with a shoulder injury. He remained on the substitutes’ bench as Benzema punished Loris Karius’ error to put Madrid ahead, only for Sadio Mané to snaffle an equaliser just four minutes later.
The game was toing and froing – a joy for the neutral, but perhaps not for Zidane. With 30 minutes left, he turned to his No.11.
“I was desperate to get onto that pitch,” says Bale, enthusiastically slapping his thigh for emphasis. “When I ran on I was still a bit angry, and that’s probably why I did what I did next.”
Regular FFT readers may recall the winger’s description of ‘what he did next’ from our 2018 awards special [295]. It was an otherworldly strike the likes of which you see once in a lifetime.
“In those split seconds you have to think very quickly, and I knew it would be difficult to turn and bring the ball down,” he said, describing a goal he admits is the best he’s ever scored. “I’d tried shots like that from a similar position a few times in training, but although I’d come close to scoring a few times, I’d never been successful.
“It was instinctive,” he added. “I got my body positioned correctly, got my footwork right and caught the ball perfectly. When you catch the ball perfectly, you know it’s on target – you just have to hope the goalkeeper doesn’t make an unbelievable save. So I knew as soon as I’d hit it that it had a chance of going in.”
It was an overhead kick that left Liverpool spinning, just as Jurgen Klopp’s side had started to seem in the ascendancy.
“I’ve watched it back a couple of times,” Bale admits with a smirk. “I didn’t feel like I had a point to prove. I wanted to do it for myself and the team. If you play in any final you want to be going home with the trophy, no matter what it takes. If it meant waiting to come on for the last 30 minutes, so be it.”
The ball had barely hit the net before the social media brigade were debating whether it was an even better volley than the beaut scored by Zidane in Madrid’s 2002 final victory over Bayer Leverkusen.
However, the two men didn’t have their own debate post-match, or at all, following the Frenchman’s departure from the Madrid dugout shortly after the season’s end.
“He didn’t talk to me about it – I still haven’t spoken to him since,” reveals Bale. “Our relationship was good. I wouldn’t say we were best mates, but it was a normal professional relationship.”
This had been – at least up to this point – the 29-year-old’s defining moment, firmly putting even his most fantastical feats of the past well and truly in the shade: his Champions League treble at Inter in 2010, the aforementioned wonder-goal against Barça, even leading Wales to the semi-finals of Euro 2016.
So surely, for Bale, this particular European triumph outranks all of those before it? Well, perhaps not.
“I’m not sure I’d say it was the best – they’re all special in different ways,” he says, stroking his chin like a wise old sage.
“The one in Cardiff [2017] was a little bit different. To be honest, I was lucky to be involved at all because I’d had such a bad ankle injury, and I’d been finding it really difficult to come back from that. So I actually felt like I’d done pretty well just to play the last 13 minutes. The fact it was back in Cardiff was very special for me – three weeks before that, I didn’t think I had any chance of playing.
“Obviously the first win is always particularly special, because it’s all new to you – it’s any player’s dream to win the Champions League and you don’t know what to expect when you get to a final, let alone score the winning goal. But after you’ve experienced it a few times, you have a better understanding of the emotions before, during and after.”
FFT wonders what it’s like to be quite so nonchalant when discussing winning four Champions League titles in five seasons – does repeated gratification dull the pleasure?
“I wouldn’t say it feels like just another game, because they still feel like massive games,” he says, clearly keen not to undersell he and his team’s historic achievements. “But the more you practise something, the more comfortable you are doing it. Going into the last two finals, we’ve not felt the pressure as we’ve been through it before. We didn’t have the same nerves as we did in the first two.
“I was chatting to Adam Lallana after the Liverpool final and I asked him whether they’d been nervous the night before. He told me they’d all been struggling to sleep. We’d all been really relaxed because we were so used to being in that situation. That gave us a big advantage, as we knew how to deal with the emotions of everything surrounding a big final. Maybe Liverpool didn’t.”
Madrid had been an unstoppable Champions League machine over the past three seasons, but they were about to lose a key component.
When Cristiano Ronaldo’s €100m move to Juventus was confirmed on July 10, 2018, it was hardly a big surprise. The Portuguese’s transfer to Turin had been the subject of widespread speculation for weeks – but the deal still sent shockwaves through the game.
This was, after all, one of the greatest players of all-time – a guy who had scored a scarcely believable 450 goals in 438 appearances for Real Madrid since arriving from Manchester United, and been awarded the Ballon d’or on five occasions.
“I WAS STILL ANGRY AT NOT STARTING THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINAL WHEN I RAN ON – MAYBE THAT’S WHY I DID WHAT I DID NEXT”
You don’t sell a player like that and not notice he’s gone. Madrid are a team packed full of stars, but they were still losing their talisman. They would need a replacement, and the immediate suggestion was it could come from within.
“Bale is under the spotlight so I hope he can show us his enormous talent,” said new Real manager Santiago Solari, shortly after replacing Julen Lopetegui following the club’s below-par start to the campaign. There have also been hints from inside the Madrid dressing room that Bale is the best man to fill that Cristiano-shaped hole.
“Ronaldo is irreplaceable – you can’t forget what he did at this club,” Blancos keeper Courtois commented at December’s Club World Cup in the UAE. “But he isn’t here any more, so it’s time for other players, like Bale did in the semi-final, to score the goals Ronaldo used to score.”
The Welshman’s hat-trick against Asian champions Kashima Antlers in the aforementioned semi set Madrid on their way to a third straight success in the competition. It might not be the most highly-regarded event on British shores, and the opposition not always the strongest, but it was nevertheless another statement display from Bale.
The question is: does he feel the burden of expectation weighing on his shoulders more heavily than before?
“I wouldn’t really say my role has changed much this season,” the Welshman tells FFT with a calmness that underlines his point. “Every player just wants to do as well as he can for his club, and that’s what I’m continuing to do here.
“I don’t think I’ve had to be more vocal in the dressing room, either. The dressing room at Real Madrid is always the same – very calm, very well organised, with everyone knowing what they need to do.”
Despite the upheaval over the summer and more disappointment in La Liga – Real went five games without a win October, including a 5-1 shellacking at Barcelona – relative tranquility seemingly still remains at the Bernabeu.
After all, this is a vastly experienced dressing room, and 10 current players have been around for those four recent European triumphs – Bale, Nacho, Casemiro, Raphael Varane, Dani Carvajal, Luka Modric, Karim Benzema, Isco, Marcelo and skipper Sergio Ramos.
Speaking of Ramos, FFT is interested in finding out exactly what the long-serving Los Blancos centre-back is like behind closed doors.
“He’s a bit of a joker,” laughs Bale, unwilling to delve into specifics. “He’s the captain and he always leads by example. He’s very vocal in outlining what we need to do and making sure the team is motivated. He’s pretty much exactly like what you see out on the pitch – he’s so determined, committed, competitive. I wouldn’t say he was quite as intense, but he definitely makes his presence known.”
Should Bale, Ramos & Co. go the distance once again this season, they would slot into joint-second on the list of most successful players in European Cup history, with only the great Francisco Gento (a winner with Los Blancos in 1956, ’57, ’58, ’59, ’60 and ’66) ahead of them.
Having ascended that medals table so quickly, does the Welshman fancy his chances of reaching the summit one day?
“We’ll see,” he smiles. “We aim to win every competition we enter, so the target is to win as many as possible. You can’t win too many!”
Not since the days of Gento has a side dominated Europe quite like modern-era Madrid. Yet this team don’t appear to be held in as high regard as other all-conquering outfits from days gone by. So, in Bale’s opinion, are this most recent incarnation of Real the best team ever?
“It’s not really for me to judge, but in terms of trophies won I think you could definitely argue that we are,” says Bale, having mulled over the question for a moment. “It’d been a long time since anyone won the European Cup two years in a row, let alone three.” Even better than Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona side of 2008-2012? “Maybe Barça’s style of play was different, but at the end of the day it’s about results and trophies, and you can’t argue with our four wins in five seasons. Don’t get me wrong, their style of play was incredible, but maybe it wasn’t as effective in terms of winning the competition.”
Now, after another frustrating start to a league campaign in 2018-19, Real Madrid’s primary focus in the second half of the season will turn to Ol’ Big Ears again.
“I wouldn’t say it’s the priority [over La Liga], but it’s definitely a big thing for us to win the Champions League,” says Bale. “It just feels like everyone here is geared towards winning it.
“Whoever we play, we feel like we can beat on any given day,” the winger insists, and with good reason – Real have won 79 Champions League matches in the last decade.
With that in mind, we ask the man who knows a thing or four about winning the competition for his assessment of the Premier League’s Champions League contenders.
“I’ve not been able to watch too much of it, because obviously I’ve been playing on half the nights and we’re sometimes training on the others,” explains Bale. “There are too many matches to keep up with!
“Liverpool look like a very good team,” he begins. “They have been getting some really impressive results. They look even stronger now, and they’ve improved defensively.
“Manchester City were amazing in the Premier League last season. They’ve got so many fantastic players - Kevin De Bruyne, David Silva, Sergio Aguero – and a great manager. “Tottenham are a good young team, who are well organised with a good manager – we saw that last season. “And Man United may not have been in the best moment earlier in the season, but you can never write them off. From this point onwards, the Champions League is a cup competition, and what happened in the first half of the season doesn’t matter. “Last season we didn’t do so well in the league but we won the Champions League – you can go on a cup run. The flip side of that is obviously you can’t make mistakes. Once the knockout stage comes around, you have to be ruthless.”
The rest of Europe beware – Gareth’s after number five.
“IN TERMS OF TROPHIES, YOU COULD ARGUE WE’RE THE BEST TEAM EVER – WE’VE WON FOUR CHAMPIONS LEAGUES IN FIVE YEARS”