Zidane, Bale and a cruel twist of footballing fate
The brutal reality, when you get right down to it, is that Zinedine Zidane has just never really fancied Gareth Bale as a player.
The French legend personally scouted Bale for Florentino Perez back when Real Madrid were first trying to sign the Welsh star back in 2013, precisely because the club president highly valued his opinion - but there was already some difference on this issue then.
Zidane watched Bale’s Europa League performance for Tottenham Hotspur against Lyon that February and,
Teammates say his inability to speak the language is something of a myth, but he's just not confident enough to speak it in public. Which makes this all about something much more fundamental.
Zidane has really had plans for a team without Bale since first taking the job in 2015-16, but always buckled under the influence of Perez and - to be fair - the resilience of the player himself. Bale has so often come up with solutions of his own, just when facing a problem. The best example of that remains the 2018 Champions League final against Liverpool. Bale started on the bench, in a move that looked set to finish his Bernabeu career. He instead made that career even more special with the two goals that won the game, the first a bicycle kick to rival Zinedine Zidane’s 2002 volley as this historic fixture’s greatest.
It was quite a counter-argument.
Perez tried to make another counter-argument to Zidane on Wednesday, to convince the manager to give Bale another chance. This time, though, there wasn’t as much leverage. There was no Champions League final goal, emphasising how the team has needed the change, and there were more injury problems.
Zidane now definitively wants him gone. The Madrid dressing room all think it will be to the Chinese Super League.
Bale, as his outspoken agent Jonathan Barnett has emphasised, isn’t so easily moved. The fact he’s still at Madrid is proof of that alone, and the word from those close to both is that they’d still rather sit out this heavily-paid three-year contract at the Bernabeu than go to China. And why wouldn’t they?
Sources close to Neymar also say some key figures there are trying to engineer a potential swap for Bale, and that Paris Saint-Germain may be interested.
Zidane however isn’t so keen on the Brazilian either, and that French interest still entirely depends on Neymar’s future.
His former club Tottenham Hotspur also have tentative interest - with Mauricio Pochettino injecting a bit of mischief to the situation with his own quotes about it all on Sunday - but there is still the feeling such a prudent club would never stump up the money required.
It feels, of course, like we’ve heard all this before. Zidane has even said some of this before. We don’t really know whether it will result in action. It could still end with Bale sitting sedentarily on the bench, until the end of that contract.