Gareth Bale Fighting Body, Mind and More in Search of Real Madrid Success

A third of the way through the Clasico at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium on April 23, the game was in the mix. Lionel Messi had just slalomed his way through Real Madrid's packed defence in the box to score, helping Barcelona to draw level at 1-1.

A couple of minutes later, Madrid's Gareth Bale broke down close to the halfway line, clutching his left calf muscle. Several of the club's medical team rushed on to the pitch to attend to him, and he had to be substituted.

As Bale left the pitch, he stopped again between the dugouts. His medical aides fussed over him for a few moments before disappearing en masse down the tunnel. To his right, a couple of yards away, his manager, Zinedine Zidane, had been looking straight on.

There was no consolatory pat on the shoulder for the injured Bale; Zidane's focus was elsewhere.

It has been a frustrating time for Bale at Madrid. There have been huge highs. These include a match-winner straight from the pages of a comic strip in the 2014 Copa del Rey final in which he charged 60 metres in seven seconds to score against Barca. But these are mixed in with the dreadful lows of recurring, niggling injuries.

Since arriving—injured—at Real Madrid in September 2013, with the burdensome label of "world's most expensive player" swinging from his neck, he's been in the sick bay 17 times, including a lengthy spell out this season with a right-ankle injury, which he picked up in a Champions League tie against Sporting CP in November.

Madridistas are fed up with the stop-start nature to his Real Madrid career despite the tantalising glimpses of genius. The team is more balanced—and has a significantly better win ratio this season, per AFP—without him in it. The fact that Isco, the player deputising for him, is Spanish and a crowd favourite adds to the disillusionment.

Bale has been blighted by injury since joining Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League a decade ago, aged 17; although he arrived in London with a clean bill of health.

"There was absolutely nothing for us to worry about when we signed him. The boy was a freak!" says Damien Comolli, the former director of football at Spurs who signed Bale and was responsible for the club’s medical department.

Bale went through a growth spurt from the age of 14 to 16, which knocked his back out of alignment and affected his mobility, per Frank Worrall's Gareth Bale: The Biography, but Dr Diego Schwarzstein, who treated Messi's growth-hormone issues as a child, says there is nothing to suggest these growing pains could have contributed to his later injury woes.

"If you are a high-level athlete during your teens and you experience a fast period of growth, you can have some muscular injuries, but they have no consequences after the period of growth," he says.

Bale has, however, laboured with persistent back trouble during his career, including back injuries in January 2011 and August 2012 while at Spurs. A month after he joined Madrid, in the run-up to his first Clasico in October 2013, Marca ran a front-page story on his troublesome back, an expose that was quickly dubbed "Balegate" in press circles.

The paper claimed Bale had a slipped disc on his L5-S1 vertebrae and a bulge on the L4-L5, which would require corrective surgery. Real Madrid dismissed the report as "completely false." Club doctor Carlos Diez admitted on Spanish radio station Cadena Ser, per El Pais (in Spanish), that Bale had a back injury but his medical team at the Bernabeu had devised a treatment regime for it.

Juan Muro Zabaleta, who has worked with the Wales international during a 21-year career as a Real Madrid physio, says that 50 per cent of Bale's problems stem from his back, which has a knock-on effect on his calf muscles (where he has picked up eight injuries in four seasons in La Liga).

"I remember Gareth Bale has a problem in the disc of the lumbar area," he says. "He has a little protrusion. With this kind of problem, the [stress] on the calf muscles comes from the lumbar area with the sciatic nerve. If you don't have good condition of this lumbar area, the calf muscles will tear."

Zabaleta draws a comparison between the physiology of Bale and team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo.

The pair are often likened because of their similar physique and playing styles, but Zabaleta points out that Ronaldo has a stronger trunk whereas Bale is more developed in his lower limbs.

"Bale has huge calf muscles," he says. "That's why he runs so fast. He's incredible. He is very powerful in his calves."

The 27-year-old has been blessed with blistering pace since childhood, clocking 100 metres in 11.4 seconds at 14 years of age, per the Telegraph. According to a study of 10 elite footballers earlier this year by Mexican club CF Pachuca, Bale registered as "the fastest player on the planet," per Agencia EFE.

Conditioning expert Raymond Verheijen, who worked with Bale while assistant coach for the Wales national team, says the player's explosiveness can render him prone to injury, though. He used an analogy from the savannah to illustrate his point.

"When a leopard is chasing his prey, he has 30 or 40 seconds to catch it," he says. "After which time, he has to stop chasing the prey. Otherwise he accumulates too much heat. His brain stops functioning and he dies. He has to stop and recover for four or five hours in the shadow under a tree.

"It's the same with explosive players. They explode and then after explosive football action, they need more time to recover than the average player who is less explosive.

“The advantage for Lionel Messi, for example, is that he is allowed to do whatever he wants on the pitch. Messi paces himself in the game. He's just walking, recovering. During the game, he is the leopard in the shadow under the tree, recovering.

"Players like Gareth Bale, they have to keep sprinting for 40 to 50 metres up and down the pitch. That is the difference between Bale and Messi."

Bale has a considerably worse injury profile than Messi, and worse again when compared to Ronaldo. Over the last decade, the Portugal international has played more than 30 league games a season eight times. The Welshman has only hit that 30-game mark four times over the same period.

"What might be a difference between Cristiano Ronaldo and Bale is the fact that in his early years, Ronaldo didn't pick up any big injuries, so he has no scars in his body," Verheijen says.

"He has no weak links. Because the tempo in top-flight football is so high, when you have injuries in your early days they are ticking time bombs that explode once in a while. Bale picked up injuries from the beginning. He has scars. His hamstring, for example, is a weak link."

Compounding this vulnerability to injury for Bale is the fact he's often rushed back into action prematurely.

Before the Clasico match against Barca in April, for example, a report by Cadena Ser claimed Zidane risked playing Bale—who was returning from a calf injury sustained a week earlier against Bayern Munich, per Diario AS—despite advice from Madrid's medical team that his winger wasn't fully fit.

The radio report maintained he had an edema (a swelling caused by excess fluid trapped in the body's tissues) that could easily trigger a relapse of his calf injury, which is what happened 36 minutes into the match against Barcelona.

"The reason the body produces edema—or swelling—is because it's a protective mechanism and a response to injury or damage. It makes sense that the medical team were concerned," says former New York Knicks director of conditioning and fitness Andy Barr, who was head of sports medicine during Bale's time at Southampton.

"If there was an edema issue before the game, he shouldn't have been playing, but the player wants to play, especially if he's been out for a long period. The frustration levels are immense, which hinders the process—and the coach wants him to play. You see it all the time."

When returning from injury, Bale's body compensates for the recuperating part, consciously and often unconsciously. His long-term ankle injury over the winter, for example, was on his right side. In the spring, he has had recurring left calf muscle injuries.

"He could have changed his mechanics," says Barr. "He might have had an imbalance, overloading on his left side because he injured his right ankle, which is why his left calf strained."

There are several other factors that have contributed to his injury problems. They range from fatigue—following his exertions last summer, for instance, during Wales' Euro 2016 adventure, which hampered his pre-season training—to unquantifiable ones like luck, stress and possible issues in his private life.

Then there's the esoteric, among them the playing surface at the Bernabeu and the seat of his Lamborghini sports car.

Coverage in parts of the Spanish media makes Bale out to be made from glass. Comparisons have been drawn, for example with the injury-plagued Real Madrid career of Jonathan Woodgate (a one-time team-mate of Bale's at Spurs), per Diario AS (h/t the Daily Express).

Such articles revive memories of an early-career assessment by Bale's old boss at White Hart Lane, Harry Redknapp, who felt the player was too weedy.

"Every time he got touched, he'd limp off the training ground and then be right back again in five minutes," Redknapp said, per Gareth Bale: The Biography. He told Bale he needed to man up. "I just said: 'C'mon Gareth, stop f--king about with your barnet and toughen up.' Real tactical stuff, but it worked."

Zidane doesn't have to worry about Bale's courage, though. He's delivered several times on the big stage for the manager, including the only goal in last year's Champions League semi-final and an assist and a goal in the penalty shootout in their final victory over Atletico Madrid at the San Siro in Milan.

Zidane's dilemma is whether he will start Bale—who hasn't played since the Clasico—in Saturday's Champions League final. The Real Madrid coach has said before that if his frontline of Bale, Karim Benzema and Ronaldo are fit, they play, per Marca. The fact that the final is in Bale's hometown of Cardiff will add to the strain on the player's mind and body. 

"Gareth Bale will have dreamed about the final of the Champions League since he was a child," says Zabaleta. "Now he has the possibility of playing the final at home. You want to be a prophet in your own land.

"This will create stress. It will be difficult to get good sleep. Also he is recovering from a calf muscle injury, so he might think he will play the game but that he won't be 100 per cent fit. This will create anxiety, a fight in his brain. This kind of stress, day in day out, is not going to help him recover."

Should Bale play, the world—or the bones of half a billion TV viewers—will be tuning in to see if he comes through the ordeal and proves decisive for Real Madrid.

*All quotes and information obtained firsthand unless otherwise indicated