Gareth Bale's mother and father, Frank and Debbie, most likely by no means dreamt their solely son would develop into the world's costliest footballer. Scroll down for pictures...
There had been many surreal moments throughout Real Madrid's ceremonial unveiling yesterday of 24-year-old Bale, the previous Tottenham Hotspur winger whose world-recordfeeeclipsed even that paid 4 years in the past for his sensible new teammate, Cristiano Ronaldo.
But his household's self-conscious ascent to a purpose-built stage in entrance of an over-excited crowd of 40,000 on the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid, the place they smiled sheepishly for an enormous battery of cameras, was essentially the most gloriously unlikely of all of them. Especially because the splendidly motley Bale household occupied the area simply vacated by the Spanish membership's glossy and pampered multi-millionaire administrators. Real Madrid president Florentino Perez stayed the place he was although.
The flamboyant development billionaire manifestly tried to look as if Frank Bale, a former faculty caretaker, was his new finest pal. It would have been a priceless spectacle, besides after all that the proceedings got here with a worth very firmly hooked up: £86 million.
Even by Real Madrid's extravagant — and in Spain's present financial local weather, considerably grotesque — requirements, that's a substantial amount of cash to pay for one man.
When requested if he was price it, Bale sidestepped the difficulty saying that taking part in for Real Madrid would really feel like a dream fulfilled – 'whether or not for a penny or no matter it was'.
Bale's girlfriend Emma, the childhood sweetheart to whom he dedicates every purpose by making a coronary heart form together with his palms, additionally appears to have had a makeover in readiness for the relentlessly intense scrutiny of the 'Madridistas'. In Britain, she has stayed out of the limelight, and has been described as 'homely'.