Real Madrid president Florentino Perez has claimed that Manchester United launched a bid for Gareth Bale before the Spanish giants bought the winger from Tottenham this summer.

Bale completed a £85 million move to Real from Spurs in the summer after a long and drawn out transfer saga, however, the Spanish club’s president has claimed that Man United failed in an attempt to hijack the deal.

“I believe that Tottenham truly did not want to sell him,” Perez told Spanish radio show El Larguero. “We respected that they did not want to sell him. We found out at a certain moment that Manchester United were going to make an offer.
  “That is when we made ours. The player heard about that, and since he was small he has been a Madrid fan. His dream was to play for Madrid, and when he heard we had made a good offer for him, he did everything possible to come here.”

He added, “[Bale] was cheap. I have not said the amount. Every time there is talk of figures, the figures which someone wants to come out are those that come out. Madrid’s model is the model of Santiago Bernabeu – to have the best players.

“That produces an important effect, both sporting and economic. I have already showed this, as in the year 2000 Madrid was in a bad situation losing money. And signing [Luis] Figo, [Zinedine] Zidane and [David] Beckham, even though they were very expensive, we started making money. That is a model which works in business, and in football, which is also a business.

“When we signed Zidane for a very big amount of money – about €75 million – we changed from Teka who paid us 400 [million pesetas] to Siemens who paid us 4,000.
“That was because of Zidane. Kaka was Adidas, and Cristiano [Ronaldo] was Nike.

“[Having Kaka] helped us to renew our contract with Adidas, in a very important way. It is true that we had bad luck from a sporting perspective, above all he was injured at the World Cup the next year and from there he did not give the sporting performance we expected, but from the financial point of view he helped us a lot. All these players helped us to grow from €100 million in revenues to more than €500 million.”