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Gareth Bale and BT Sport – what does it mean for Spurs?

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Gareth Bale, BT Sport, Tottenham Hotspur

It perhaps tells you everything you need to know about football in today’s age, that a seethingly bland corporate press release is now enough to get the pulses racing.

It may well be more a reflection of The Hotspur Way’s limited threshold of excitement, that BT’s recent announcement that it’s signed our very own Gareth Bale up, was enough to get us smiling. But in the grand old scheme of things, it’s enough for us to make a couple of wild assumptions – one of which will probably build our hopes up high enough to get painfully smashed at the end of the season.

So what are the real benefits for us as Spurs fans?

Bale’s three-year deal to become an ambassador for BT Sport means a lot of things for us. Firstly, it might mean we don’t have to watch that ginger melt prance around his penthouse flat claiming he needs a faster Internet connection for his ‘student digs’.

Second of all, the sight of our boy Bale plastered across the television is likely to wind our rivals up to previously unseen extents and if a marketing buff can devise some form of advert where he dives over a stray Ethernet cable, then it would be absolute TV gold.

But most prominently, although it would be incredibly naïve to read too much into his deal with BT, we are perhaps entitled to interpret the deal as a relatively positive sign for his future with the club.

You don’t need a business degree to come to the conclusion that a La Liga departure for Bale probably wouldn’t do much for BT’s promotion of their 38 Premier League games. You would have thought that ideally, you’d be handing your ‘lucrative deal’ to advertise your expensively acquired television rights contract to a player who will actually be playing in the competition.

Does this mean that we can take it as a given that Bale will be playing in the Premier League for the next three years? Probably not, although it would certainly seem strange that both parties would agree to it if the Welshman really was likely to be packing his bags for Real Madrid before playing a single game in front of the BT cameras.

And equally, should we fail to attain Champions League football, the whole game could likely change anyway. We’ve heard plenty of talk in recent weeks that Bale’s missus would rather stay and raise baby AVB on these shores for one more year, although that plan might go kaput very quickly if we manage to self-destruct for another consecutive season.

No one really knows where his future lies- probably not even the man himself – but you can’t help but feel that if we do finish in the top-four, he’ll stay. The team is set up around him, he’s guaranteed to be the centre of attention here and let’s face it, he’s still only 23-years-old. If carries on like he has done, it’s inevitable he’ll move on to one of the world’s biggest clubs, but he doesn’t have to now.

Perhaps all this BT deal now means is that if we do manage to stuff things up, he could end up on his way to Manchester, as opposed to Madrid. Could they afford him? Would he want to go there? Is he in fact a Virgin Media customer? Who knows. But let’s make sure it doesn’t get to that stage and simply finish in the top four outright.

Easy, right?

COYS

@samuel_antrobus

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