A version of this article was originally published in June 2022
Everyone has their own favourite Gareth Bale moment, whether he played for your team or not.
If you are a Wales fan, it might be the winner against Scotland in 2012, where he ran from the halfway line and put the ball in the top corner with two minutes remaining. It could be the towering header and free kick in Andorra in 2014, kickstarting his country’s run to Euro 2016, or the winners against Belgium or Cyprus to get Wales to France.
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It could be the free kick against Slovakia in Bordeaux or the one from even further out against England in Lens, or the stabbed third against Russia in Toulouse to win Group B for Wales. Or maybe how he dominated Wales’ last-16 tie against Northern Ireland in Paris, forcing the only goal of the game and sending his team through to the quarter-finals.
Younger fans may point to how he helped drag Wales to a second straight European Championship with those big goals against Azerbaijan and Croatia in 2019, or his two assists against Turkey in Baku to get Wales through the group at Euro 2020.
Or, in a World Cup qualification campaign that culminated in an emotionally charged triumph over Ukraine, that hat-trick against Belarus on a Kazan cabbage-patch that kept the dream alive — or maybe the free kick against Austria in April that was still accelerating when it hit the net.
And let’s not forget that, in converting a penalty kick against the United States in Qatar, he scored his country’s first World Cup finals goal in 64 years.
If you are a Tottenham fan or even just a watcher of English football, you will have your own list. Maybe it’s that unique volley at Stoke City in 2010, left leg perpendicular to his right, or when he destroyed Inter Milan at White Hart Lane three months later, one of the great European nights at that old ground, or his hat-trick at San Siro two weeks before.
Or you could pick any one of a long list from the 2012-13 season, when Bale managed to outdo himself week after week with another moment more spectacular and dramatic than the last. The free kicks against Liverpool, Newcastle United and the pair against Lyon; the solo goals at Norwich or Old Trafford; the header against Southampton; or any of those three at the climax of the season: West Ham, Southampton and Sunderland. All of them from far out, into the top corner, at the very end of the game.
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Or maybe you have no interest in Wales or English football, and only know Bale from Real Madrid. Even there, surrounded by some of the best players of his generation, Bale still did things nobody else could do.
There was the 2014 Champions League final, when Bale’s leaping far-post header put Real 2-1 up to set up La Decima. Four years later in Kyiv, Bale put Real Madrid 2-1 up with an even more spectacular goal, leaping high into the air to connect with a perfect bicycle kick. (Bale completed the win against Liverpool with another goal from distance, his strike squirming through Loris Karius’ hands.)
Most “Bale” of all was another late winner in another huge game, the 2014 Copa del Rey final against Barcelona, when with five minutes left, he sprinted off the pitch, around the outside of Marc Bartra and down the left wing before stabbing the ball into the net. (Nobody else scored goals like this but Bale had netted a mirror image for Wales against Iceland just a few weeks before.)
Even his brief stint in the United States with LAFC ended with a 128th minute equaliser that took the 2022 MLS Cup against Philadelphia Union to a penalty shoot-out, which LAFC then won 3-0.
Everywhere Bale has gone, he has left indelible memories and there has always been something thrillingly comic-book about what he does, and how he does it; about his raw power, his speed with the ball, his ability to rise to the moment when it matters most.
In that sense, he is almost a rebuke to the modern game. Football today is increasingly defined by system-obedience, with the best players the ones who are most able to internalise their manager’s instructions and repeatedly execute them on the pitch. Bale is not like that. He is audacious, he is improvisational, he is individualistic, and he has always been implausibly decisive.
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Bale had that magic habit of appearing to turn football from a team game into an individual one. For each of his three club teams to date, he has propelled them to a place they had never been before and had long been desperate to get to.
Wales had not been to a major tournament since their first in 1958, remember, and generations of great players (Ian Rush, Ryan Giggs, Neville Southall, Mark Hughes) had never got to one. But Bale fired Wales there in 2016 and then took them all the way to the semi-finals too. As if to prove it was no fluke, Bale did it again to get Wales to Euro 2020. Then he helped them qualify for Qatar 2022.
Tottenham had never played in the Champions League when Bale showed up, having come close in the past but never getting over the line. Bale helped to get them there, the club finishing fourth in 2009-10, at the time their best league campaign since the 1980s.
Then Bale made sure Spurs made an impression on the tournament, reaching the quarter-finals. He pushed them to another fourth-placed finish in 2011-12 and Spurs would have had another season in that competition had Bayern Munich not lost their home final to Chelsea. In Bale’s final season, Spurs finished fifth but with more points than they did either time they came fourth.
When Real Madrid signed Bale in 2013, they were trying to break out of a long spell of European underachievement and win their treasured Decima. In Bale’s first season, they won their 10th. In his third, their 11th. In 2021-22, his final season at the club, they won their 14th. Even if he did not have much of a role in this one, Bale did kickstart this whole era.
Put these two elements together — the memorable heights he hit and the transformative effect he had on his teams — and it feels most of the way towards a definition of footballing greatness. By these two measures alone, Bale should surely be considered as one of the greatest British players of his generation. So why doesn’t it necessarily feel that way?
Because despite all the arguments in Bale’s favour, it does not look right now like he will end up being remembered as warmly as he should. Maybe that will change in time when we get enough distance from his achievements to see them in perspective.
Maybe he has just moved to the margins of our football consciousness. He has not played club football in England for ten years, save for one season on loan at Spurs which took place almost entirely behind closed doors. He is not like Wayne Rooney or Steven Gerrard or Frank Lampard, whose whole club careers we witnessed up close.
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But there seems to be something else on the other side of the scale here. Perhaps it is an argument about consistency and reliability. Bale has always been an ultimate moments man, someone who rises to the occasion when his team needed him. But there is another side to being a great player and that is being ready and able to play week in, week out, for a long period of time, and the reality of the second half of Bale’s career is that he fell away from being an important or even valued player for Real Madrid.
There were injuries, there was the decline of his relationship with Zinedine Zidane, there was the sense that he never fully bought into life in Spain and the traditions of the club itself.
The numbers tell a clear enough story. Only in Bale’s first two seasons in Spain did he play more than 2,000 minutes in the league (from a maximum possible each season of 3,420). Over the course of his eight seasons in Spain, he averaged 1,592 league minutes per season. (By contrast, since Bale arrived at Real Madrid, Luka Modric has averaged 2,197 minutes per season and Karim Benzema 2,518.)
The story of the second half of Bale’s Real Madrid career has been that of an expensive fringe player, one who was whistled by fans, who nearly joined Jiangsu Suning in China in 2019, and was then allowed to go back to Tottenham on loan in 2020.
But then how much does any of this matter?
Bale was never the heart of Real Madrid in the way that Iker Casillas or Sergio Ramos or Modric or Benzema were or are in their own ways, but the criticism he got for disrespecting the sanctity of the institution always felt slightly misplaced.
Bale fundamentally saw Real Madrid for what it was: a business — and a business that paid huge amounts of money to buy him from Tottenham and then to pay his salary. Bale was within his rights not to walk out on that money and none of his team-mates played for free, either.
Maybe that is a transactional view but given that Bale scored three goals in Champions League finals, he did hold up his side of the deal. (And while some might like to portray Bale as a mercenary, the love and pride that he has playing for his country, with the same team-mates since he was a teenager, should be a rebuke to that.)
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Ultimately, this hinges on your definition of greatness. If you want someone who hit a high performance standard and did it over and over and over again hundreds and hundreds of times, well, there are other players who did that, like Lampard or Giggs. If you want someone who broke goalscoring records, there is Rooney. If you want someone who could win games and trophies by himself while remaining the heartbeat of his boyhood club, there is Gerrard.
But if you like your football heroes doing big dramatic things when it matters most, rewriting the history of his teams as he goes, reminding you why you fell in love with football in the first place, then there will always be Gareth Bale.
(Photo: Helios de la Rubia/Real Madrid via Getty Images)
