Masterstroke or mistake? Who cares, Bale's return to Spurs is intoxicating
As a long-term observer it is always tempting to look out for moments that capture the essence of modern football, those single images that really get its basic weirdness. A personal favourite is the terrifying cube of death built by Qatar 2022 on the banks of the Moskva river at the last World Cup, a beautiful glass and steel exhibition centre intended to generate a thrill of carefree excitement about the next global festival of football, but one that resembled simultaneously a giant haunted cancerous polyp overseen by alien lizard secret service personnel.
There are plenty more everyday candidates. Gianni Infantino stepping on to a Gazprom private jet. Neymar running away from his teammates celebrating a goal by Neymar in an empty stadium where, just for a moment, the only audible sound is Neymar celebrating a goal by Neymar.
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The list is by no means exclusive, and new members are always welcome. Maybe this is why it was so tempting to see something of this kind in Gareth Bale’s potential move back to Tottenham Hotspur.
As talk of Bale to Spurs hardened into a serious possibility this week my instant reaction was that this would be a self-evidently terrible piece of business.It isn’t hard to see what Tottenham actually need right now. They need youth, energy and maniacal commitment. They need a blueprint for renewal. They need to save money. How much, all things considered, do they need a 31-year-old celebrity athlete whose career has been defined in the last few years by remoteness and distraction, by stalled moves to Jiangsu Suning and Beijing Sinobo Guoan, and who has scored twice in his home stadium in the past two years? So pull up a chair and get ready for another great snapshot, a few weeks from now, as Bale is subbed off at half-time in an empty mega-stadium by a vindictive super-coach whose employment rests on a balance of brand‑management versus outsized redundancy payments. That’s a wrap. We have our ultimate modern football moment.
Except, on reflection, this doesn’t feel quite right. Or rather, it might be right. Let’s be honest, it probably is right. But it might also be entirely wrong. Never mind the warning notes. This could also turn out to be a masterstroke. For a start, it is an incredibly exciting move. Bale is that rare thing, a genuine sporting superstar. And the Premier League needs this stuff right now, this noise, this glitz.
Lets be honest, we all need it. The world is a pretty grim and gruelling place, and they’re already talking about cancelling Christmas. I don’t want hard reality. I want to be entertained, transported, made to think about brilliance and narrative jeopardy. This, meanwhile, is gold, a great fat sweeping storyline shot through with glitz, character arc, and above all total uncertainly about what might happen next.
It could even work out on the pitch. The thing that changed my mind here was the fact that, looking down the current list, Tottenham don’t really have many good players. This might seem a laughably simplistic analysis, but football is a simple game, and Bale is undeniably a very good player. Fitness and rust permitting Bale, Harry Kane and Son Heung-min up front is a mouthwatering prospect. Not to mention an attack where, for the first time since his breakout season, Kane will not be the centre of gravity, the only outright star.
Plus, we’re talking about a loan move, an appealingly cut-price way of ushering an instant A-lister into your team. It makes sense. Tottenham Hotspur in its current state is an act of salesmanship, a brand growth exercise with some ultimate point of sale in mind. That light has gone a little dim in recent months. There is – and here we feel the cold, hard grip of Daniel Levy at our elbow – quite a lot of logic here.
Mainly, though, this is about talent and possibility. It is easy to forget – given football’s endless superlatives – but Bale wasn’t only good in the Premier League. For two years he was astonishingly good; good in a way that goes beyond the numbers into pure spectacle.
Peak Gareth arrived in that period between November 2012 and March 2013. Playing a fluid, roving role, he just kept picking up the ball and running through the opposition, the pitch suddenly too small, his markers too mortal and human, a man playing with a kind of light around him.
Others have been as devastating, or more effective for a more sustained period. But in that period Bale was playing a different game, a role that seemed to need a new title, something along the lines of Eager High-Speed Goal-Shoot Man or Laughing Sprint Attack Humiliation. Nobody this century has made English football look so thrillingly simple.
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The obvious counter to this is that Bale isn’t the same player, and indeed that this isn’t the same game. Not only have those un-tenanted spaces been pressed out of existence, the man in the YouTube reels is seven years older. He has even looked a little glazed and bored at times.
On the other hand, the upside of Bale’s marginalising is that the injuries have begun to dry up. Energy has been conserved. In a way football has moved towards Bale too, becoming ever more a game of sprints, of power running, qualities that never really seemed to fit in Madrid.
For those, like me, who want to believe it is worth bearing in mind that modern football happened to Bale rather than the other way round, that it was Madrid who agreed to pay him all those unrecoupable millions while he drifted along, floating in his tin can high above the world, a genuinely strange superstar career.
Bale to Spurs feels like a closing chapter. Its brilliance lies in the muscle-memory of a genuinely extreme talent; and the sense that the ending remains entirely unwritten.
