Soccer sets a new record
Football has moved its goalposts again with the 100-million euro transfer of Welshman Gareth Bale to Real Madrid. The football economy seems to have its own momentum, paying no heed to the recessionary trend seen across Europe and the US since 2008. Spain was one of Europe’s under-performing economies, seen in its 26.26 per cent unemployment rate (May 2013), which needed a bailout.
The transfer at such a time for a record fee that surpassed what was paid for the Cristiano Ronaldo transfer out of Manchester United in 2009 has set tongues wagging. The Spanish sporting scenario is something else altogether, with the rivalry between two super clubs FC Barcelona and Real Madrid CF probably egging on this move to rope in Bale, who can at best be called a rising star. It’s quite another matter that his future as a Galactico may be strikingly different if the promise and improvement he has shown in the past few seasons is any indication.
As one of the richest professional sports worldwide outside the United States, soccer has some magnetic attractions that makes the game a unique sociological phenomenon, with plus and minus points. The unreal salaries like the half-a-million dollars a week that Bale will get in his
new club are instant rewards of a system that has grown quite out of proportion to the reality of middle-class existence in the new world. But then sport, as they say, is sport, an indefinable commodity quite unlike anything else.
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