Everyone was convinced that, once he hung up his boots, Gareth Bale would end up devoting himself entirely to golf, his favourite sport perhaps even more than football itself, and for years a minor point of irritation for Real Madrid fans who read it as a kind of distraction, fairways taking precedence over pitches, although what has followed sits somewhere else entirely, closer to investment language than anything resembling a sporting retirement.
Four years have passed since his last appearance on a football pitch, at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar when Wales returned to the tournament after 64 years away, an ending that never really behaves like one, and now he is part of a US-based investment structure where the vocabulary changes almost immediately, ownership models, funds, positioning, a different kind of visibility altogether, already traced by players such as Beckham, Ibrahimović, Piqué and Maldini, each moving into the game after the game.
Plymouth came close at one point, League One, his hometown club, an operation set up with an investment fund already involved, it never quite reached completion and simply drifted away, while Cardiff City remains in a different register, more persistent, less spoken, “It’s where I was born,” he said, “it’s close to my heart, it’s my home country.”
Before all of this there is a sense of movement that never quite settled into form, “I’ve always had a tendency to try lots of different things,” Bale told BBC Sport Wales, “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do after football, everyone jokes I would just play golf, but I’ve also tried being a sports commentator, doing advertising work and other things,” a list that doesn’t really build toward anything, it just sits there as a sequence.
John Shulman enters through finance, Juggernaut Capital, private equity in the United States, football absorbed into a wider portfolio logic where “many players go on to become coaches, directors or academy managers,” he said, “but recently you can see more and more people with a more business-oriented mindset, I’ve always been fascinated by this but I never had the opportunity until I met John,” while the firm itself, managing around one billion dollars, already moves through sport in other directions, golf, volleyball, and now football where acquisition targets begin to appear and conversations are already happening around several clubs.
Bale does not correct the direction of it, “It won’t be a club like Tottenham, Chelsea or Manchester United,” he said, “we are doing our research, trying to find the right club,” while Juggernaut Diversified Sports forms around him without needing to announce itself, “Only a handful of human beings in the world have done what he has done,” Shulman said, “we are good investors but what we were missing was the mindset, the experience, the determination and the unique perspective of a player like him,” and the admiration becomes almost structural rather than descriptive, “this guy has everything,” he continued, “what he can do on the pitch I’ve also seen in the boardroom,” before the cadence drops again into repetition rather than emphasis, “right time, right place, right way,” while women’s football is folded into the same expansion logic, described as a “golden age of investment” shaped by visibility and broadcast reach, and Bale remains in a kind of suspension between roles, not resolved into anything final, still moving through what comes after, with golf now only an assumption from another time.