GET REAL, GARETH! MADRID CAN BE ‘MURDER’
MICHAEL OWEN, who admits to depression in the hardest year of his life at Real Madrid, has warned Gareth Bale that life off the pitch in Spain is not one long siesta. The former England striker, who made the shock switch from Liverpool to the Bernabeu in 2004, was stuck in a hotel for five months with his baby Gemma and wife Louise. The couple would put their daughter to bed at 7.30pm and tiptoe around in darkness. ‘[The changes are] huge,’ said Owen yesterday. ‘I underestimated that when I went to Real Madrid, certainly from a family point of view. From a football point of view, I think Bale would do particularly well. But I think for any player going from these shores to Spain, it is a lot different to how you first imagine it.’ When asked on BBC 5 Live’s
Sportsweek how many changes he would have made to his time at Real, Owen added: ‘How long have you got? ‘Off the pitch, it’s very difficult. The Spanish culture is a very easy way of life; there’s a slow pace to it. ‘When you get over there, you want to move into a house and get settled, get your wife happy, your kids happy and your family and everyone else happy, and you’re trying to change as well, but unfortunately you’re stuck in a hotel for five months. The legal system and all these things to buy a house are so slow. We wanted to do it as quick as we could, but I was in a hotel for five months with a young child.’ There are several parallels between Owen, 33, and Tottenham’s Bale. The England forward was 24 when he joined Real, the same age as Bale. Owen had spent eight years playing professionally for Liverpool, while Bale has given six years of service to Spurs. Owen had his first child the year before he moved, and the Welshman has just had
his first, Alba Violet, with his partner, Emma Rhys-Jones. In his autobiography, Michael Owen: Off the
Record, he recalled: ‘[It] was murder. For three-anda-half months, Louise, Gemma and I were in a businessmen’s hotel in a quiet area where there were no parks for our daughter to run around. I felt awful leaving for work at 10 every morning. Coming back at 1pm, I’d often find them bored to tears. So we went out and about in Madrid, locating the parks and all the landmarks. Even then, it would be lights out for Gemma by 7.30pm, and Louise and I would tip-toe round in the pitch black.’ It was difficult for Owen to make friends as he could not speak Spanish well. Back at Liverpool, he had been ‘one of the jokers, an organiser, a key member of the card school’. Owen added: ‘In the darker moments, I missed my family, my house, my old team-mates, the golfing, my dogs, the whole English package, even the rain. ‘Right from the start of the 2004-05 campaign, when I arrived at the world’s most famous club, I knew inside that I wanted to come home after one season. That feeling only intensified the longer I was in Spain.’