At the time Gareth Bale signed for Tottenham from Southampton in 2007, he was much the same teenager as the star of the PE department at Cardiff’s Whitchurch High School. Those around the club’s Enfield training ground would remark on his shyness – a little homesick and yet to make concrete friends, he would spend long sessions in the gym, simply for something to do.
Bale was transformed during his six years in north London (six-and-a-half if you count his loan spell in 2021), though the great pity is that his time there did not coincide with Spurs becoming a serious force under Mauricio Pochettino.
In the only final the club won in that period – the 2008 League Cup – he did not play. In the photos of the trophy lift, you can just about make his face out at the far left of the very back row, wearing a suit and carrying crutches.
At the time, he was not deemed much of a loss. Bale was to embark on a 24-game winless run, a streak so alarming Sir Alex Ferguson famously told Spurs’ next manager, Harry Redknapp, not to play him. So the moniker “Bad Luck Bale” began to stick. A year later, he featured against Manchester United in another League Cup final at Wembley, but Spurs drew 0-0 and then lost on penalties.
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It might have been better to keep the secret – his hat-trick against Inter Milan, taking Spurs from 4-0 down to a narrow 4-3 defeat in the San Siro, catapulted him into the European imagination.
In the return he terrorised Maicon, then one of the world’s best defenders, oozing pace and power – but gracefully – and assisting Peter Crouch and Roman Pavlyuchenko in one of the club’s greatest European nights under the lights.
White Hart Lane roared his name every time he got the ball. It was never entirely clear if that feeling was reciprocated – he did not appear at the stadium’s closing ceremony with a host of other legends in 2017, and decided not to extend his ill-fated stay under Jose Mourinho and Ryan Mason two years ago. On the day he re-signed, fans waited outside the ground for a glimpse of him, or in the hope of buying one of the first “BALE 9” shirts from the megastore.
In the wider game, there will remain a feeling this understated superstar was never quite given the respect he deserved. Rightly or wrongly, Bale lacked swagger in an era of Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar. Still, he will be remembered alongside Harry Kane, Ledley King and Luka Modric in a small pantheon of modern Tottenham icons.
He was not nominated for the Ballon d’Or until 2013, the year he left Spurs – and while an £85m transfer had made him the world’s most expensive footballer, he only came ninth in the rankings. He received just three more nominations, but came 12th, 6th, and 17th, often behind players like Diego Costa and Javier Mascherano.
In later years, Bale’s mild manner would cause him problems; by all accounts he was uninterested in socialising with his Real Madrid team-mates and he never saw eye to eye with Zinedine Zidane. By then, though, he had a young family, happily settled in Spain. There was always a sense that his life was in football, but it wasn’t his life. Hence the infamous flag: Wales, Golf, Madrid. In that order.
Where Spurs feature in that list is up for debate, but he is still revered in a way he never quite achieved in Spain – despite the five Champions League titles.
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