The entire team Spurs could have bought by selling Bale still isn't worth it

Arsene Wenger has blasted Real Madrid's proposed £105m bid for Gareth Bale as a "joke". Transfer fees like that are ruining football, making everything worse, and get off my lawn.

In fact, this transfer fee is so ridiculous, here's an entire team Real Madrid could have bought instead of chasing our Welsh wizard all summer:

FACT: For the same price as Gareth Bale you can buy this entire Starting XI. pic.twitter.com/g2ZEMmO0n3

— BBC Sporf (@BBCSporf) August 2, 2013

That's a lot of players! Man, Real Madrid sure are big fat stupidheads, why didn't they buy them instead?! I'm glad you asked, curious reader. All those players combined wouldn't improve Real as much as Gareth Bale would. Signing Bale makes a statement that signing a whole team worth of mediocre-to-great talent can't match. Bale is a top five player in the world with ridiculous on-pitch and marketing potential who screams marquee signing (literally. he just keeps screaming it, all the time. it's getting kind of annoying, actually. maybe we should sell him).

But Spurs, you might say, because for some reason you really want to participate in this article-writing process, look at all the shiny new toys you could get with that Bale money! You could get a whole new team, and god knows you need one because you're so crap.

Except that team's mostly crap too. Aging, subpar center backs? The French Scott Parker? A guy who called Jurgen Klopp "stupid" and is therefore clinically insane? No thanks.

And where it isn't crap, the players were never coming here. Villa already turned us down. Benat has Bilbao DNA. Mario Gomez seems to just really really like Florence. You get the idea.

This illustrates a couple of things. a) It's a slow news day; b) Real Madrid are getting desperate to appease their fans and; c) The market is shrinking by the day and top talent that Spurs can attract is tough to come by.

Real Madrid have really painted themselves into a corner here by promising the fans a guy like Gareth Bale. They already missed Neymar and missing out on Bale means their fans are going to have to settle for someone like Suarez and Spain's got enough problems these days without Madridistas rioting in the streets.

But tough shit.

Because upgrading our squad with a month to go is going to be a seriously uphill battle and going into the season with an unsettled squad full of half a dozen new first team faces at the expense of our best player is not the way to achieve Champions League qualification. We learned that lesson last year.

Or at least I seriously hope we did.