- Feb 13, 2004
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To be perfectly honest Bale deserves the biggest stage to play on and RM can offer him that.
If we can get between £70-80 mill for him I think we actually should be doing the deal. If we have 20-30 mill in the pot which is feasible and we sell Bale but move in to the market with £90-100 mill in our pockets we could significantly improve the team as a whole.
Bale is a great great player and personally I think he's the 3rd best player in the world right now and it would be devestating to lose him, however 5 £20 mill or 4 £25 mill players would conceivably make us a better side as a whole!
Levy and AVB have a big decision to make here!
I don't know where this notion that very good players deserve to be playing at the highest level comes from.* Clubs try to buy as many good players as possible, players try to reach as high a level as possible. It is the players job to the players to perform to their very best to attract the attention of the best clubs and to manage their careers so as to get the chance of earning contracts with those clubs. It is the clubs job to attain the highest level possible. I support THFC, and I believe Spurs deserve to be playing at the highest level, the very highest level. Spurs can only do that by acquiring the best group of players possible, Gareth Bale is one of the best players possible to acquire, therefore Spurs deserve to keep him and keep him as long as possible,
*Or, rather, I do know, the media and agents seem to be the ones, nowadays, who decide which clubs are allowed to succeed. For their differing reasons that seems to mean preserving the status quo. We are not one of their faves so they don't like us having very good players - so they agitate, using the invented argument of deserving to play for to play their part in engineering the moves of all the best players to status quo clubs.
We should be able to command the same, or more, next Summer (or the Summer after). So, accepting that he will go eventually, what would be best for us would be to keep him and hope that, say, Pritchard, who would be perfect in AVB's preferred 4-3-3, develops as we hope he will. That way, we could have a huge amount of money to reinvest and a ready-made replacement. So, I agree, losing Bale, if and when we lose him, will not be the end of the World (despite the histrionics on this thread). But I honestly believe that the EPL will be very wide open and tight at the top, United wouldn't have been so far ahead without Beetroot Head's know how, and we would have done better if we hadn't been in a transition year, with horrible injuries to very important players, and bagatelle that culminated in Adebayor being a bag-of-shite for much of the season. With Bale, the natural improvement in the squad/AVB and the players we are going to buy without selling Bale, I believe we can get very close, and certainly quialify for CL - and that is before seeing our rivals' transfer business. Our most likely targets, the Goons, don't seem to have anyone anywhere near the quality of Bale coming through, and no matter what transfer kitty Whinger gets they are highly unlikely to sign someone of Bale's level - besides, IMVHO the Whinger is losing his touch in the transfer market. So, we will be the team with the recognised genuine match-winning superstar in the team, and the rest of our squad should match theirs, at the least.
I would be happy to see Bale playing at the highest level. I would prefer that to be with us. If it isn't with us, then as long as he handles himself with dignity and treats the club with respect I would be okay with him playing for the likes of Real. But what is best for the club is to keep him for as long as possible (where possible could be his whole career), or, at least, next season.
COYS