Where will Bale fit in?

A look at the challenge facing Carlo Ancelotti to accommodate Gareth Bale at Real Madrid.

"Florentino Perez has no project," Eugenio Martinez Bravo told AS earlier this summer. The leader of the Plataforma Blanca was launching his ambitious plan to challenge the 66-year-old for the Real Madrid presidency. What Bravo appeared to overlook was that Perez does have a plan. It's called the Galacticos Project. And it continues apace at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium. It is not news that Perez specialises in the showpiece signing. The acquisition of Luis Figo from rivals Barcelona was perhaps the most significant reason why he first assumed the presidency of a club that had won the Champions League in two of the previous three seasons. He duly delivered the Portuguese winger at a world record fee and followed up with the signing of Zinedine Zidane for an even bigger sum the following summer. The minor inconvenience of results on the pitch contributed to the Perez presidency come to an end in 2006 but three years later he was back, breaking the world record twice more within a fortnight of taking the helm. In came Kaka from AC Milan before Cristiano Ronaldo joined from Manchester United for £80million. While Ronaldo has been a success in Madrid, surely there can be no doubt this is football as vanity project with the numbers just getting bigger and bigger. It's almost as though nobody has the nerve to sidle up to Florentino Perez and ask where these superstar signings are actually supposed to play. The point is moot. Carlo Ancelotti is the man now tasked with solving that particular puzzle. Or should that be fudging it? The Italian is better placed than most to deal with the challenge, having shown at both AC Milan and Paris St Germain he is effective enough when it comes to handling big names being foisted upon him. Whether saddled with unconvincing and overweight versions of Brazilian duo Ronaldo and Ronaldinho or expected to accommodate a 37-year-old David Beckham, Ancelotti is your man. In contrast to those parodies of former greats, Gareth Bale is a man playing the best football of his career. And while professional coaches and Football Manager addicts everywhere will envy Ancelotti, the Real coach still faces the conundrum of how best to utilise his €100m man. After all, Real Madrid have just broken their own world record transfer fee to buy the second-best left-sided forward on the planet when they already own the best. Of course, where players of this quality are concerned there are always options. The most obvious of which is to get Bale to play elsewhere on the field. While Harry Redknapp may have insisted that the Welshman can become the world's greatest left-back, even Real don't pay this kind of money for players to form part of their back-four. A more likely solution is to move Bale to an alternate attacking midfield role...

Options

That process had already begun under Andre Villas-Boas. The chants of the spring of 2012 imploring Redknapp to play Bale on the left flank soon stopped when it became clear that the player could flourish given more freedom, albeit within Villas-Boas' tactical structure. "With Andre, there's a certain shape and a style we play," Bale told Sport magazine. "There's a lot more tactical work. I think it's something that's good to learn." And learn he did. Bale scored his first Premier League hat-trick on Boxing Day in a 4-0 thrashing of Aston Villa, thriving by cutting