Bale: 'In football we are commanded, it's like we are robots'

21 mag 2019

Gareth Bale, the seemingly unwanted Real Madrid winger, has spoken about life as professional footballer on the set of State of Play, the next BT Sports movie: “As a professional athlete, particularly in a team environment, you can’t choose your own timetable like in golf or tennis. It’s like we’re basically just robots. We’re told where to be, when to be there, what time we have to eat, what time we have to report to the coach. It’s as though you lose your freedom to a certain extent.”

“You can’t decide what you want to do and when you want to do it,” Bale continues. “So in that sense, I can totally understand why people say that. But on the other hand, I think that a career in football is so short that you have to sacrifice those things. When you’re a kid, you don’t so much going on in your head, you can just play with your mates and have a laugh. When you become a professional there are all types of pressure, of expectation, of people saying negative things about you all the time, and you lose that feeling you had as a kid.”