Gareth Bale transfer: Real Madrid star left with moral dilemma - to leave football’s peak or line gilded pockets?

He watches the ball float towards him, coils his back like a gymnast in tumble, and flings his left leg with scything precision. Before his body can thud against the floor, the net is shaking from its top corner. It’s the 2018 Champions League final and Gareth Bale has just scored arguably the greatest goal in the competition’s history, an audacious and ludicrously spectacular overhead kick to put Real Madrid on course for a third straight title. It’s a goal of such magnitude it lives on rewind, is immortalised in club history and should have etched its protagonist into cult lore.

“Bale came on, he does what he does... what else do you want me to tell you?” Zinedine Zidane told the gushing Spanish press afterwards. Moments later, Bale was hinting that he wanted to leave over a lack of playing time. This was, at least, supposed to be a perfect ending.

Fast forward 12 drear months that have seen Madrid flounder in the void left by Cristiano Ronaldo and Bale’s feat that night lives in the peripheries to the narrow-minded. A blind spot in what has been brushed as a punctured career at Madrid, where he has become a scapegoat for supporters’ derision and even a subject for snide mockery by his own teammates.

Florentino Perez, Madrid’s president, has made no secret of his desperation to free the club of Bale’s exorbitant wage bracket and Zidane urgently requires access to the coffers to overhaul a squad that was lapped by Barcelona on the Catalan’s procession to the league title. A trifecta of board, coach and fanbase all backing Bale into a corner, from which only his agent has cried out for solidarity.

The resentment is symptomatic of Bale’s standoffish status as British football’s greatest export. A then world record £85m signing who has always pervaded a sense of distance – whether from the media or his teammates in Madrid – and despite his success has failed to grasp truly iconic status. During his time in Madrid, he was won 14 trophies, four Champions Leagues and scored 102 goals but is now treated as though he may as well have burgled them. Even in his brilliant sonatas, such as the Copa del Rey final goal in 2014 or the overhead kick against Liverpool, he has never been graced with absolute adoration in Spain.

It’s now no exaggeration to say that that under-appreciation has been supplanted by public displays of loathing. Last Sunday, Bale was left on the bench for the entirety of what was expected to be his final game with the club. For Madrid’s two previous matches, he was left out of the squad entirely with Zidane attempting no veiled theatre around the pair’s finite divorce. “It’s clear what I have done this weekend,” he said when questioned afterwards. “The past won’t be forgotten but as a coach I have to live the present. I see what I see day-by-day.” The subtext could not scream any louder.

Bale has admirably braved face despite all the vitriol gratuitously funnelled in his direction. He has always been business savvy and is acutely aware that the catalyst for Madrid’s orchestrated and desperate attempt to dislodge him lies in that he still holds the trump card: his haemorrhaging £17m-per-year salary does not expire for another three seasons.

Bale is still vastly talented, but his whirring pace has lost a gear and he remains, as ever, fragile and injury prone as he approaches his 30th birthday. No other club will offer him a wage anywhere near comparable and any move would likely be his last.

So the dilemma belongs firmly to him. Even in an industry so volatile to change, his scars with Zidane appear to bear too much tissue to be wiped clean. He can either embark on a final chapter and revel in his last peaks as a player or idle for large parts on the sidelines and line gilded pockets.

Already unfathomably rich and drowned by achievement, the answer to many is obvious. To be reduced to an unwanted burden would be a sad and undeserved end to such a brilliant if staccato career; even if his temptation to spite those working against him at Madrid could be seen as well founded.

Perhaps the more pertinent question is whether the withering effect of the past months has sapped Bale not just of his want and stomach, but partially of his love for the game. His recently maligned description of life in the sport as “robotic” and nickname of “the golfer” readily fan that theory.

When you’ve reached the very peak and there’s little left to prove, it’s hard to summon the energy to journey back in the direction you came. The perfect ending no longer exists so perhaps it is simply easier to stay put. To reign at the top with one foot out the door – uneasy lies a head that wears the crown.