Not many British players have had the opportunity to represent Real Madrid, but those that do usually leave their mark.
The chance to play for Real remains incredibly prestigious and some of British football’s biggest names have strutted their stuff at the Bernabeu.
We’ve taken a look at how the six British players to play for Real fared in the Spanish capital.
Gareth Bale
He may have salted the earth at Real Madrid with his perceived reluctance to embrace Spanish culture and his love of golf, but Bale has experienced immense success in Spain.
After completing a move from Tottenham in 2013 for a then-world record transfer fee, Bale picked up the habit of scoring crucial goals while never fully winning over the Madrid fans.
His highlights included that goal in Kyiv and five – five! – Champions League trophies, with an important role to play in all but the last one. Time will be extremely kind to the Welshman’s legacy at Madrid.
Jonathan Woodgate
One of the great bad debuts and not much else – Woodgate’s time at Real Madrid was disastrous.
The centre-back had to wait a year to make an appearance following injury problems and proceeded to mark the occasion with an own goal and red card.
That’s where the story usually ends, but Woodgate did establish himself in the first team during the 2005-06 season, only for injuries to strike again, and he moved to boyhood club Middlesbrough in 2006.
In 2007, he was voted the worst signing of the 21st century by readers of Marca, Spain’s leading sports daily newspaper.
READ: Remembering Jonathan Woodgate’s calamitous Real Madrid debut
Michael Owen
It never really happened for Owen at Real, but he was more effective than is usually remembered.
Signed at the peak of the club’s Galacticos era, Owen was competing with the likes of Raul and Ronaldo for a starting spot.
Sixteen goals in 45 appearances doesn’t sound too bad in that context, but the England striker was frustrated with the lack of opportunities and moved to Newcastle in 2005.
In his autobiography Reboot – My Life, My Time, Owen said: “As strange and perhaps defeatist as this might sound, almost as soon as we arrived in Spain, I instinctively had this sense that my time there was going to be short.
“From mid-August, the club put us up in a hotel while we tried to find a house. The two of us existing in one room, with a young daughter who was at the age where she needed to be entertained, would have been difficult enough…
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