Gareth Bale, Real Madrid and the Big Nonsense of Big Football

One of the very first things they teach you on screenwriting courses and creative writing seminars is to establish your principal character’s yearning. What does your protagonist want? What motivates them? The Bride in Kill Bill is driven by a dark and murderous desire to avenge the lover who put a bullet in her head. Robin Williams’s character in Mrs Doubtfire is desperate to see the children to whom he has been denied access. Keanu Reeves characters are generally driven by an urgent need to save humanity whilst employing as few facial expressions as possible.

What they don’t tell you, however, is that some of the most compelling and interesting characters in fiction are those seemingly without motivation at all. What does Amelie want, for example? Or Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men? Or even - if we’re talking hierarchies of needs here - James Bond? If yearning gives a character a defined shape and journey, then the absence of it provides a fascinating blank canvas: a spellbinding void at the very heart of the story that becomes as much a palimpsest of our own projections as an agent in its own right.

Which brings us, in an unnecessarily roundabout sort of way, to Gareth Bale: a man who in many ways is football’s very own spellbinding void, and who this week has been in the headlines despite doing, on the face of it, extremely little.

Certainly he was nowhere to be seen as his Real Madrid teammates went down to a low-key 1-0 defeat against his old club Tottenham in a pre-season friendly in Munich on Wednesday. Later, of course, it transpired that Bale had been playing golf while recovering from injury, a perfectly mundane and unobjectionable pursuit that nonetheless seemed to exercise certain people in all sorts of directions. Speaking in the press conference afterwards, one reporter asked Zinedine Zidane if Bale had shown a “lack of respect” by playing golf while his teammates were so clearly engaged in more critical matters.

“He has to look after his responsibilities,” is all the Madrid manager would say on the matter, not that that was going to stop the various tingling gills of the internet from glowing Sriracha-red with excitement over Zidane BREAKING HIS SILENCE on the LATEST TWIST in the ONGOING SHOWDOWN between the WELSH ACE and the THIRTEEN-TIME EUROPEAN CHAMPIONS. Last week, you will recall, Bale was left FURIOUS by Madrid’s 11TH-HOUR REFUSAL to sell him to Jiangsu Suning in the Chinese Super League, an occurrence that once more appeared to leave his Madrid future at a CROSSROADS and Caps Lock buttons the world over begging for mercy.

What’s uniquely interesting about this story, now six years (!) in the telling, for all the froth and fizz, all the endless talking by serious-looking men in open-necked shirts in television and radio studios, all the badly-spelled comments left under poorly-written internet articles, is how astonishingly little has actually changed. For all the crisis meetings and transfer speculation, Bale and Real Madrid have remained in a loveless holding pattern: at a permanent crossroads, in indefinite showdown mode, like chained dance partners waltzing into dystopian eternity. His golf handicap has come down. He’s accumulated a few European Cups. His hair has changed a bit. And meanwhile, we are all six years older; but not wiser, and certainly no closer to knowing, at the most basic level, what this most gifted of footballers truly wants out of life.

This is, perhaps, a peculiarly modern phenomenon, a product not just of the knotted madness of football’s internal market but of the increasingly diverse ways in which star footballers measure their success, and the increasingly heated pitch in which we discuss them. What do footballers want? And if that’s an overly simplistic question, what do we want them to want? Trophies? Money? Ballon d’Ors? Some highly subjective idea of glory or romance? Perhaps it’s time to admit that the relationship between today’s star players and the game they play is far more complex than many of us imagine.

Often Bale’s obsession with golf is placed in direct contrast to his footballing ambition, as if it were impossible to like both. Certainly it seems to have done him no favours in Spain, where he has been doubly cursed by his auxiliary role in Madrid’s era of European dominance: not quite good enough to adore, not quite bad enough to abhor. And so Bale has in many ways become a test case for how we assess individual careers in the age of the megaclub, where bald achievement is insufficient to secure a legacy in its own right.

If we’re measuring amplitude, then Bale scores highly. If we’re measuring the length of the journey, then it’s suddenly a good deal less straightforward. All of which is complicated further by the loud banality of the noise around him: the off-the-record briefings, the online polls, the spittle-flecked disgust and disappointment with which pundits and fans talk about him moving to ‘China’, as if he were a teenage girl running away to join Isis, rather than a wealthy athlete simply sizing up the highest offer on the table.

This is, in many ways, the Big Nonsense of Big Football: a million different tensions that move us nowhere but are somehow bleakly essential to the functioning of the game. The Community Shield takes place this weekend, a Big Event from which People will doubtless learn Things. Harry Maguire is moving to Manchester United, a move that will generate literally millions of meaningless words before he has so much as headed his first opponent. Questions that have no need to be asked will bestow answers with no value. Takes will be heated and reheated, and eaten, and burped back into our eyes as clickable picture galleries.

And at the very heart of it all: what does Gareth Bale want? I don’t know, and nor do you. Maybe he wants to scoop up a few more trophies before he finally twangs his knees for the last time. Maybe he wants to play for a club and a manager that truly value him. Maybe he just wants to play a little football and go home to his family every evening. Maybe it’s a combination of all of these, or maybe he doesn’t even know himself. The oceans steadily rise. Wars rage and children starve. Vast sums of money filter through invisible wires, past national borders, through twirls of blockchain. In his palatial home in Madrid, Gareth Bale opens the curtains. It’s a glorious summer morning, and he wonders silently whether he can fit in nine holes before lunch.