In July 2013, Gareth Bale was sold to Real Madrid.
Bale had enjoyed a remarkable season at Tottenham, scoring 21 goals and
being voted the FWA’s Footballer of the Year, and after a drawn-out negotiation,
Spurs and Real finally agreed on an £85.1m transfer, a world-record fee at the time.
Bale would enjoy plenty of success in Spain, winning four Champions League titles. Tottenham,
meanwhile, would spend that summer hastily conducting a rebuild with the money raised,
and this is the story of the seven players who arrived.
The boast at the time was that Tottenham had “sold Elvis and bought the Beatles”.
Well, not quite: this is what happened to the Gareth Bale 7.
The longest-serving member of that seven has only just left.
In late July, Erik Lamela moved to Sevilla as part of the deal which brought Bryan Gil to England.
A highly touted £30m signing from Roma, he was a highly polarising figure from the day he arrived
and suffered from direct comparison with Bale, with whom he shared few similarities.
Lamela was part of the group of players who made great strides under Mauricio Pochettino.
His workrate won him admiration, so did his spiky temperament and his personal
highlight reel contains two of the most remarkable goals of the club’s modern era.
Nevertheless, injuries and patchy form limited him to more of a cult hero status among supporters.
Christian Eriksen was certainly a fan-favourite, though. Long heralded as a future star of the
game, his stock had fallen by 2013 and he was into the final year of his contract at Ajax.
He would cost just £11.5m and despite a disjointed first season, during which he’d experience injury,
the sacking of Andre Villas-Boas and Tim Sherwood’s short spell as head-coach,
he would become one of the key components in Pochettino’s team
before, after over six years at the club, being sold to Inter Milan for £20m.
Paulinho was not a success.
He was actually the player many supporters were most excited by. Initially at least. He’d
just turned 25 when he arrived for £17.75m and the year before he’d won the Copa Libertadores
with Corinthians. Coupled with a few impressive performances for the Brazilian national team and
a rough framing as a South American Frank Lampard, Spurs fans thought they were getting a bargain.
They were not. In fact, he what he was exactly remains an unanswered riddle.
He would leave the club for a loss after less than two years,
heading to the Chinese Super League before a bizarre return to Europe with Barcelona.
Roberto Soldado’s time in North London was often agonising.
Always a patchy, form player, Soldado had nevertheless developed a reputation
in LaLiga for being one of Europe’s better goalscorers.
He scored goals everywhere he went: Osasuna, Getafe, and most famously at Valencia.
Not at Tottenham though.
He scored on his debut, converting a penalty in a 1-0 win over Crystal Palace, but he would score
just 16 times before losing his place to Harry Kane and then leaving for Villarreal in 2015.
Years later, Soldado would reflect that what “let me down at Tottenham was my head” and that he’d
also struggled to overcome the expectations that came with a £27m transfer fee. He certainly looked
like a player with demons; some of his misses in front of goal remain hard to watch to this day.
Nacer Chadli was actually very good in front of goal. He arrived for a little over £7m from Twente
and with little ceremony, but he would prove an important bridging
player in Pochettino’s early years, playing from the left and often the
right before the Harry Kane-Dele Alli-Son Heung-min axis was properly established.
Spurs would almost double their money on Chadli. He was sold to West Brom for £13.5m in 2016
and while his time at the Hawthorns is largely forgotten,
it did include a very late equaliser against Tottenham in October 2016.
Because of course it did.
Chadli has had a nomadic career. He would leave West Brom after their relegation from
the Premier League, and has had single seasons stays at Monaco and Anderlecht,
and is currently playing for Istanbul Baseksehir in the Turkish Super Lig.
Etienne Capoue has also been successful;
he was part of the Villarreal side that won the Europa League in 2021.
When he joined Tottenham for £10m, it looked like a very smart move indeed.
At Toulouse, Capoue made a name for himself as one of the brightest young ball-winners in France
and he looked like a clever addition to a midfield which was about to lose Scott Parker’s tenacity.
It was false promise. Injuries saw him miss much of his first season
and he was another who fell through the cracks under Pochettino,
before being sold to Watford two years later with whom he would rebuild his reputation.
And Vlad Chiriches, who probably had the least effect of all,
but whose arrival was certainly the most dramatic.
Chiriches was an elegant, ball-playing defender and Tottenham beat a host of other clubs
to to strike a deal Steaua Bucharest in late July. But they hadn’t reckoned with imprisoned Steaua
owner Gigi Becali. who intervened from his jail cell to call off the deal – Becali didn’t want
Chiriches sold during Steaua’s attempt to progress through the Champions League playoff rounds.
And that was a smart decision: Steaua qualified for the group stages and,
on the last day of August, as the transfer window was closing,
Chiriches became the final member of Gareth Bale 7, signing for £8.5m.
Not that it was really worth the fuss. Aside from wearing
a terrifying face mask and scoring an unlikely long-ranger against Fulham,
Chiriches’ Spurs career amounted to fewer than 30 Premier League appearances.
He’d be sold to Napoli in 2015 and is currently still in Serie A, playing for Sassuolo.