Don’t think he’s the right player for us at all, he’s the kind of player that Man U might get conned into taking on.
Look at the last few big signings for us - Janssen, Son, Sanchez, Aurier, Moura, Ndombele.
All youngish types with hungry attitude (hopefully) and potential to become better, some have been a hit and some have been a miss but that’s the risk you take for buying potential.
Bale is the exact opposite of this. Almost 30, injury prone, questionable attitude, bloated salary, bloated contract, you say we might get 3-4 good years out of him but equally the risk is that we might get almost nothing out of him.
My personal view is we should keep doing what we are doing now; invest in potential and hope we find more players like Eriksen and Son and Dele who becomes 5 times as much as what we paid for, not necessarily to sell but so that it saves us money.
We’ve become a big club, like I’d never imagined in my wildest dreams but we’re not at that stage where we are big enough to spunk 60 mil and 300k wages on a player like Bale, we should leave that to the likes or Real and Man U for a good few years at least, if ever to be honest.
Talking about Real, I mean even a team that is as wasteful as Real are trying to get rid of Bale; and we should be taking Bale off their hands???
They’d be laughing all the way to the bank and would be talking about how they’d hoodwinked us to taking on their toxic trash for years to come.
Wake up and smell the coffee guys, stop living in the past and realize what we’ve achieved by following the transfer strategy we’ve pursued for the last few years.
Not being the right type of player for us - you are probably right there because he is an absolute game changer. We don't have them do we - and when we do, they quickly leave.
Buying young and developing has been our transfer policy for years. It's worked, and got us to where we have been the last 5 seasons or so. There's a final push needed to get us over the line - and for me it's a proper world class game changer. You don't get many teams celebrating the biggest honours without players like this, and as far as I see in our squad we simply don't have one. Dele maybe on a good day, but once he is doing it every week - I expect he will fuck us off for pastures new.
Regarding the finances - 60 mil is a hefty chunk for us, but now proven to not be outside of what we are prepared to pay for players. It's a good sized fee but not astronomical in this market. But I think it's the salary that people are more concerned about stretching us.
If he joined on 200k per week, that's in line with Kane isn't it? The sort of money you would have to expect any world class player we sign to get paid as a minimum. Unless you want to tell me you think Bale is worth 60k per week and is about as valuable to us as Lamela or something - we are splitting the difference of 100k per week or 5.2mil per year.
For me that's not overly risky financially. Especially when I would expect a lot of his contract to consist of bonuses for appearances and goals.
I would go as far as to say his name alone would be financially beneficial to us for a similar sum at least.
Get your point about leaving the 300k+ players to those others clubs for now. I dont want to see us wasting money on players that potentially go all Ozil on us. The flip side is that all the while we don't match those kinds of figures, more situations like Carrick, Berbatov, Modric, Bale, Walker, Rose, Eriksen will continue to arise.
We are financially capable of paying 1 or 2 of the best players in the world this kind of money, I don't personally see it as a risk for Bale because I have watched him closely for a very long time, and fail to see anything other than a player that would take us a step beyond where we are now. Very few players we are capable of signing do that - and think Bale falls into this category of us not being capable of signing.
Real are a horrible club with a horrible fan base. Zidane wants to get rid of him and Perez wants him to stay as far as I can see. If they genuinely want to offload him most likely with an eye on FFP, I'm far from one to look at the actions of that club as a benchmark of 'the right thing to do'.
To sign a world class player this summer is certainly to do with our future. How the world including other players perceive us. Looking at the past is important too for realising where you have come from and learning from situations - but this has got nothing to do with him being possibly the biggest game changer we have ever had in the past. It's what he still is capable of now.
Who the fuck comes off the bench in a champions league final and scored and overhead kick?
Big player with big bollocks. Exactly what we need. I would see his signing now as a potential catalyst for stature growth much further into the future.
I also don't doubt that he would be one of our best players if he were to join. I wouldn't expect him to do shit like he did before - but would be expecting him to get things over the line in big games. Perhaps not from 30 yards or even overhead kicks - but big moments where you need someone capable of not losing their shit because of the situation.
Aint happening - but hypothetically I would take him all day.
