In La Finca, the gated community where so many of the world’s most celebrated footballers reside, the man-made lakes never ripple and the smell of spring blossom endures all year round. It is promoted as a suburban oasis — the most select residential estate in Europe, according to the marketing blurb.
It is there that Gareth Bale lives, within knocking distance of Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, Iker Casillas, Sergio Ramos and indeed Zinédine Zidane. Nobody really goes knocking, though. When you are a Real Madrid footballer, it is a tight community only in a physical sense.
By the admittedly inglorious standards of British footballers abroad, Bale has been a resounding success in Madrid: 81 appearances, 36 goals, including the crucial one to put Real 2-1 up in the Champions League final, the winning goal against San Lorenzo in the Club World Cup final and the spectacular winner against Barcelona in the Copa del Rey final last April. In illustrious company, he has thrived for the most part. He has remained in Ronaldo’s shadow, of course, but that was pretty much part of the job description.
At Real, though, life is never that simple. There has been an undercurrent of hostility towards Bale — certainly from sections of the Madrid press, seemingly encouraged by sections of the Real dressing room — almost from the start. Now that a run of 22 consecutive wins in all competitions has been followed in recent weeks by chastening losses at home to Schalke and home and away to Atletico Madrid, Real, in the Champions League quarter-finals and one point off the top of La Liga, are in full-blown crisis mode. In the inevitable search for scapegoats, Bale has been an easy target.
In Marca, the Madrid-based sports paper, Bale has been cast this week as a loner who “makes little or no interest to integrate himself in the team”, and is interested only in playing golf. The paper adds that Bale’s isolationism is reflected in “excessive, selfish play” and, according to an unnamed player, a reluctance to help out defensively because “he doesn’t want to”.
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Elsewhere, Bale is characterised as a “free spirit”, both on and off the pitch, and it is here that we are left to wonder about the difficulties, even in 2015, faced by elite players working abroad — and that often means overseas players in the Barclays Premier League — in unfamiliar dressing rooms where they are pigeonholed, as players and as people, even as they struggle to assimilate during the difficult first few months.
Those who know Bale well — of whom there are admittedly very few — laugh at the notion that he is a “free spirit”. On the pitch he is a soloist, but off it he is orthodox in the extreme. His narrow personality, with few interests beyond his profession, is what reassured friends to believe that this young man, who left home in south Wales to join Southampton at 16 and moved to Tottenham Hotspur at 18, would have few difficulties in adapting to the move from London to Madrid.
Bale would not be human, though, if he were unruffled by the whistles from the dreadfully impatient Bernabéu crowd and the stories leaked from the Real dressing room. They — players, it seems, as well as supporters — express frustration when, rather than playing the easy pass, he looks to beat his man and shoot from distance, but what do Real expect when they sign a player whose game and reputation have been built around such individualism?
That is the problem with Real. Their ethos these days is built around individualism, just as it was in the first wave of galácticos under Florentino Pérez’s presidency.
They do not attack with the same fluency as Barcelona, but, with the calibre of player they have, individualism is often enough not just to win matches but, under José Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti, to win trophies.
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It is beyond question that Bale’s performance level has dropped. He has neither scored nor set up a goal in his past eight appearances, but it is surely reasonable to suggest that his dip in form, like Ronaldo’s, is a symptom of a wider malaise rather than its cause.
When Real perform poorly, those big-name players — or at least those without friends at Marça — bear the brunt of the criticism. Even Ronaldo has taken flak since the turn of the year, but neither he nor Bale should take it personally. Even Zidane was castigated by the Bernabéu crowd during his time at Real.
It always seems an incredibly complex club, a dressing room in which Machiavellian politics are far too prevalent. They are a club to whom players cannot say no, but even for one who has performed as well as Bale did last season, the need to prove oneself to the most demanding crowd in football — and again, that means dressing room, press box and boardroom as well as those paying spectators in the stands — must become wearying after a while, even as the medals pile up.
The question, really, is whether Bale might end up deciding that two years at Real is enough. Those who know him insist that he has no such thoughts and is reassured by Pérez’s public support, but it is no secret that Manchester United would love to bring him “home” to the Barclays Premier League this summer.
At Old Trafford, too, Bale would find a club increasingly in thrall to individuals, but the difference is that he would be the star at United — and in a dressing room where orthodox professionalism is not mistaken for aloofness. If Bale does return to the Premier League, though, it should be with head held high. It takes a special player to survive, let alone thrive, at the Bernabéu.
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Bringing to book protesting players
John Terry and his Chelsea team-mates might be forgiven for wondering why there has been sudden condemnation of the pressure they applied on the referee during their acrimonious Champions League encounter with Paris Saint-Germain. Chelsea might be among the worst offenders, but they are far from the only ones. Indeed, Terry claims that this ritual surrounding of the referee is “part of the game”.
For the record, Fifa’s regulations state: “The captain of a team has no special status or privileges under the laws of the game, but he has a degree of responsibility for the behaviour of his team. A player who is guilty of dissent by protesting at a referee’s decision must be cautioned.”
It does not happen, though, particularly not in the Champions League. Referees deserve great sympathy for the way that players make their job impossible at times, but they have the means to clamp down on dissent and on anything that might be considered unsporting conduct. It is time they used the yellow card to remind the players who is in charge. It would not take long for the message to get through.