Why Real Madrid Would Be Mad to Sell Gareth Bale

Florentino Perez has always liked to stress the point that Real Madrid stands alone in world football. Listen to the club's president often enough and you'll hear remarks on Real's grandeur, its pulling power, the club's global might and talk of the impossible being made possible. 

In fact, Perez loves to talk about that last one: the impossible. Doing it, precisely. He's got an obsession with it, as though it's a declaration that Real Madrid, under his watch, won't conduct itself like any other club on the planet.  

He spoke of it in July at a graduation event, at the club's annual general meeting in 2013, at Isco's unveiling earlier that year and during the club's preseason in the United States a year earlier. 

It's become a mantra, a rallying cry. And either he believes he's Ethan Hunt (his presidency has actually followed a similar curve to the Mission: Impossible franchise, if you believe IMDb's ratings: He started out strong, quickly went downhill, endured a hiatus, came back stronger and now looks set to continue) or simply owns a desire to shape world football like no club administrator ever has before. 

What's fascinating, though, is that it appears likely Perez will face a decision in the next six-to-eight months that will challenge his conviction in his own mantra: whether or not to sell Gareth Bale.

If the situation of an offer eventuates—and if there's any truth to the report from Guillem Balague at AS that Manchester United are prepared to pay £120 million for Bale next summer, it looks as if it will—Perez's mind will be flooded with questions. What exact figure could I get for the Welshman? Does it make financial sense? How many players could I buy with the sale fee? Can Bale be replaced? If I sold him, what would it mean for our future? Our legacy? My legacy?

But perhaps the two biggest questions for him would be these: Would selling go against our identity as a club under my presidency? Would accepting something like £120 million be an act of giving in to football's financial realities, rather than pursuing the impossible?

Now Perez is a bit of a mad guy—he once said that Bale, who arrived for £85.3 million, came "cheaply." But he'd be a bona fide nutter if he were to sell Bale to United. 

Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno/Getty Images

Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno/Getty Images

Picture this: An extraordinarily wealthy man owns a stunning palace sitting atop the hill looking over a gorgeous city. It's an idyllic setting. Things couldn't be going better. But an exorbitant offer to purchase the property comes in, one that forces him to consider his options.

Yes, he's happy. He's extremely happy. But this is what business is about: seizing opportunities. He might already have the best one can get, but he didn't get to this point by avoiding good business deals. 

So, thinking economically, he sells, raking in a massive sum for his palace. With the money he purchases an array of fantastic properties elsewhere in the city, expanding his portfolio at no real outlay. But quickly he finds it's not the same. The magic, the sparkle of that palace is missing. No amount of fine assets can replace what he gave away. What's been spent is similar, but the product isn't. 

Ditto for selling Bale. Why sell when the money can't be used to buy better?

Of course, those of you reading may think comparing Bale with a grand palace is too far of a stretch. But consider the obvious parallels in such an analogy, noting the Welshman's stature in football. 

He's just 25. He's already the world's most expensive player. He's brushed aside the pressures of the world's biggest club. He's formed part of the most rampant attack in the sport. He's won four trophies in little more than 12 months. He's provided the telling moments in two of them.

And he's spent 18 months alongside the game's most dominant player, training with him, playing beside him, enjoying unmatched insight into how to model his game on Cristiano Ronaldo's. 

Is there a player on the planet who can feasibly be bought who's a hotter property than Bale? Who's better than him? Who possesses the same array of qualities? Who, despite already being among the world's absolute finest, has the same scope for improvement and long-term future ahead of them?

Denis Doyle/Getty Images

On Sunday, The Guardian published its list of the top 100 footballers in 2014, determined by a panel of 73 judges made up of international players, international journalists and broadcasters, and Guardian reporters, correspondents and senior editors.

Bale came in at No. 8. 

The seven ahead of him? Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Manuel Neuer, Arjen Robben, Thomas Muller, Luis Suarez and Neymar (in that order). 

Real Madrid already has the No. 1 player. And the club, due to its rivalry with Barcelona, is never getting Messi, Suarez or Neymar. That leaves the Bayern Munich trio, according to 73 very knowledgable observers, as the only players on the planet possibly accessible to Los Blancos who are potentially better than Bale right now.

But ask yourself, who would you rather build the continent's dominant force around? A goalkeeper? A 30-year-old who has been pushed out of Real Madrid once already? A roaming forward who's had a hand in fewer goals domestically than Bale across the last two seasons and whose ranking is likely due in large part to his performance at the World Cup—a competition Bale wasn't involved in? Or one of the most devastating forwards in the game?

Or perhaps you've got other names floating around in your consciousness. Maybe they're names like Marco Reus, Eden Hazard, Sergio Aguero, Diego Costa, Angel Di Maria, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Thibaut Courtois, Paul Pogba, Alexis Sanchez, Mario Gotze and Robert Lewandowski—all elite players who currently reside outside the Bernabeu. 

And yet none of them—not one—can be the same sort of cornerstone of a football club that Bale can be for the better part of the next decade. 

Shaun Botterill/Getty Images

Want the proof?

Since the beginning of the 2013-14 season, the former Tottenham star has had a hand in (goals plus assists) 55 goals in all competitions since joining Real Madrid. 

Only five players in all of Europe have more in the same period. Two of them, Ronaldo and Karim Benzema, are his team-mates. The other three are Messi, Ibrahimovic and Aguero. 

But of that quintet, two have seen entire teams built around them and streamlined for their benefit (Ronaldo and Messi), while the other three are out-and-out strikers. 

Bale? He's a winger who's forced into a right-sided midfield role as Carlo Ancelotti's system switches from a 4-3-3 in attack to a 4-4-2 when defending. 

And he's still had a hand in 55 goals—33 of them his own. This was all while playing as a second or third option to Ronaldo and Benzema. 

Of course you might question why a writer who regarded numbers as irrelevant in Bale's rise to a Ballon d'Or nomination is now bringing them up. But we're no longer talking about being recognised for achievements in a single year: The stand-alone significance of the Welshman's stunning goals in the finals of the Copa del Rey and Champions League aren't as pertinent here.

Neither is his successful adaption to a new country, culture and language. 

Instead, we're talking of his capacity to be one of the game's dominant forces. We're talking about how he can be the foundation of a football team for five-to-eight years. 

Goals win games—trophies too. And Bale, in one way or another, provides them in bunches. 

Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno/Getty Images

But it seems approximately 16,125 Real Madrid fans have forgotten that—the number who formed the 53 percent of 30,000 voters who said in an AS poll that the club should sell Bale if United makes an offer of £120 million. 

This is a player who's already the closest thing world football has to another Ronaldo (think of the pace, power, shooting ability, free-kicks, aerial prowess and technical proficiency). And he's a guy who's spent his days intimately watching Ronaldo, training with him, playing with him and copying him. What do you think the results of that are going to be?

Bale is also a guy who's progressed from being a left-back at Tottenham to a rampant forward at Real Madrid in three years. He's a guy who's had a hand in 55 goals in less than two seasons operating as a second or third option. He's the guy who scored that goal at the Mestalla. 

You don't do those things if you're not outrageously good. And Bale is that good.

Selling superstars is fraught with dangers: It's risky business at the best of times. Selling the heir to Ronaldo's throne would just be mad. And it's not how Perez will chase the impossible.