Hey, Bale

The big new in the sporting world (and for once I do mean "world") is that Real Madrid is buying Gareth Bale from Tottenham Hotspur for €100 million. (Translation for North Americans who didn't understand a word of that: big Spanish soccer team pays $130 million to get up-and-coming star from biggish English team.  And I just learned Android phones do have a Euro key.)

And this is a regular occurrence.  As soon as a great player emerges , they'll be off to a bigger team.  My family's own Aston Villa has a budding star in Christian Benteke, and its already a foregone conclusion. That he'll be gone by next year.  It's like what happens in baseball but even faster.  Fans of the poorer baseball teams worry that they only get star players for four years before the Yankees snatch them up?  That's nothing: in European soccer your lucky to get one year.

So each country's league has only a few real teams that win each year.  Some have suggested that it would be better if these top few teams in each country left their domestic leagues and joined one pan-European league.  But even that wouldn't work, since the two Spanish leaders, Real Madrid and Barcelona have emerged as the dominant teams of the continent.  Even other massive teams like Manchester United are really just working with star players that couldn't quite make the Spanish giants.  I'm not sure why Spain emerged as the ultimate hirer of European talent .  They don't seem to be any more soccer-mad than, say, Italy or England.  And they definitely aren't awash in money.  Maybe it's just because their two teams are based around two dominant cities, representing two cultures.  That would concentrate fan loyalties - and thus, fan wallets - unlike more arbitrary rivalries.

Every time a player transfers from a feeder team to a big team, I think maybe this is the point that they're finally going to realize how stupid their system is.  But it appears that nothing will provoke a change, and we'll one day see the top twenty-two players on Earth facing off in a single game, arbitrarily representing the two largest cities in Spain.