Gareth Bale's transfer to China that never happened

A manager's admission

By the summer of 2019, Gareth Bale's time in the Spanish capital had turned uneasy. Zinedine Zidane, restored as Real Madrid manager, spoke publicly that July about Bale being close to leaving the club. It was an unusually blunt admission from a manager about one of his own players, and it signalled that the relationship between Bale and the Bernabéu had reached a breaking point.

Into that opening stepped Jiangsu Suning, a Chinese Super League club looking to make a statement signing. A transfer was put together that month, with all the signs pointing towards Bale's departure from Madrid after six years in which he had become one of the most decorated players in the club's history.

The move called off

But the deal never happened. Later in July 2019, the proposed transfer to Jiangsu Suning was called off, not by Bale, but by Real Madrid. Having seemingly been ready to let their Welsh forward go, the club stepped in and stopped the move from going through.

The collapse left Bale's situation at Madrid unresolved rather than settled. Within months, reports emerged that he was said to be angry at the club and wanted to leave, only for Zidane to insist publicly, contradicting the earlier tension, that Bale had never actually asked to go. Former Real Madrid president Ramón Calderón even suggested Bale should return to Tottenham Hotspur, the club where he had made his name before his world-record 2013 transfer to the Bernabéu.

Staying on regardless

Bale remained a Real Madrid player through that turbulent period. He went on to make 16 appearances in the 2019–20 La Liga season as Madrid won the title, before eventually returning to Tottenham on loan the following year. He would play out his final season back in Madrid before leaving permanently in 2022 to join Los Angeles FC in Major League Soccer.

In hindsight, the Jiangsu Suning saga stands as one of the strangest footnotes of Bale's Madrid years, a transfer that had a manager's public blessing to happen, before the club that appeared ready to sanction it changed course and kept him.

Bale's Real Madrid career, ultimately, produced five Champions League titles, three La Liga crowns and some of the biggest goals in the competition's modern history, including two in the 2018 final that earned him the match's individual honours. Whatever tension existed behind the scenes in the summer of 2019, it never derailed the trophy-laden story he had already written in white.