LONDON — Gareth Bale is a very fine and functional player in an age when physical strength and power are as necessary as artistry with the ball.
At this stage of his career, he can only dream of being as successful on the Santiago Bernabéu stage as Cristiano Ronaldo has been. And Ronaldo is only the second most magical player in the world, after Lionel Messi.
Every word of that is subjective. It has to be, because sports is partly about athletic achievement, but an even bigger part about the performance is how it is perceived in the eyes of the beholder.
In this case, the buyer and the seller differ for their own reasons on exactly how much the price for Bale is. Tottenham Hotspur put out that it had sold its prized Welshman only because Bale wanted to go, and for a world record €100 million, which on Monday was worth $132 million. Real Madrid said it had paid marginally less than that, a tad less than the fee that it paid Manchester United to acquire Ronaldo in 2009.
The sensitivity here is Ronaldo’s ego. He wants to retain the tag, the marketing tool, of being the world’s most valuable commodity.
All this creative accounting and salary guessing make for pitiless reading in Spain, where youth unemployment is at record levels.
Some of those youths were attracted to the stadium on Monday for the grand unveiling ceremony of Bale. There he stood, in a smart dark suit, on a special pedestal built in front of the presidential box. This for a young man who is still a little self-conscious, because Bale remains, deep down, a rather shy young man.
The Bernanbéu was perhaps a third full for the presentation Monday, far fewer than the 80,000 who attended the first arrival of Ronaldo. And that — hype — is what sells shirts and countless other products to fans, no matter whether they are in Asia, Europe, the Americas or anywhere else.
But after the show, after the haggling that went on between the Spurs and Madrid (and which at least doubled the €40 million fee that was being talked about in January), Bale must prove his worth. He transcended Tottenham Hotspur; he starts as an apprentice to the Galácticos of Real Madrid.
This is more than a question of whether, at 24, he can build a legacy anywhere close to the 202 goals in 202 games that Ronaldo has thus far accumulated for the club. And presumably, Messi’s records may be out of sight. Another bewitching hat trick against Valencia on Sunday night took his total to 318 goals in 383 appearances in a Barcelona shirt.
But goals, believe it or not, are not the only appeal of these two modern greats.
Whether in the small and genuinely humble package of Messi, or in the physically larger and prima donna persona of Ronaldo, they have made themselves the modern measuring stick in the game.
We may never, in truth, be able to measure Bale’s worth, against these two or against anyone else in history. He, like George Best before him, is unlikely ever to succeed in the other milieu that matters, the World Cup, because their countries, Northern Ireland and Wales, are not capable of providing teammates to help them.
The analogy about the great pianist needing artisans to carry the piano applies. Soccer, for all this fascination with individuals, will always be a team sport. And in his development, from a gifted, leggy, fast and wayward 16-year-old at Southampton to a supremely assured game-winner at Tottenham, Bale has never eschewed the team ethic.
One wonders whether Florentino Pérez, the president who led Real Madrid to buy Bale, understands that. Pérez is a throwback to Gianni Agnelli, the former Juventus benefactor who in his decades of ownership of the Turin club bought player after great player.
“To have all these great players,” Agnelli once told me in his home, “I indulged myself perhaps more than I should.” Players of a certain type. Agnelli paid with his own money, or money from Fiat, the company he ran, to acquire Omar Sivori, Michel Platini, Roberto Baggio, Zinédine Zidane, Alessandro del Piero.
And there came a morning when Giampiero Boniperti, also a great Juventus player whom Agnelli had made president of the club, sent a message to the owner. “Ask him why he always gives me new jackets,” said Boniperti, “when the team needs new trousers.” For my sins, I was to be the one who delivered the message from the president who was expected to build a team to the patrician who constantly pleased his own eye for star performers.
Pérez is not the owner at Real Madrid and cannot dip into his own deep pockets. He uses the club members’ money, and when that runs out, he gets it from banks, but he has an entrepreneurial grasp of how to make good on those purchases through global marketing.
David Beckham, not his finest Galáctico by any stretch of the imagination, was arguably the most profitable. For talent, however, you would never compare Beckham to Zidane.
The French World Cup winner, purchased by Madrid from Juventus, justified his fee, at the time a world record. But there was a night when Zidane’s sorcery lifted the Bernabéu and a man sitting beside the president scoffed: “Zizou’s good — but Di Stefano was better.” Alfredo Di Stefano was Madrid’s first Galáctico in the 1950s. The fellow teasing Florentino Pérez was own father, Eduardo. It is all in the eye of the beholder.
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