At least not as well as you'd expect from a € 100M record transfer fee.

At risk of sounding ridiculous, expectations for Bale should never have been commensurate with that fee, and if fans have really been expecting performances commensurate with the fee they're being foolish.

Let me explain. Bale is a phenomenal player, one of the best in the world, and fans have every right to expect him to look like one. I think you're being very harsh to suggest that he hasn't looked like one at all for them, but I'm willing to concede he hasn't looked superb for them consistently - although that, too, should've been expected to some extent, a point to which I'll return.

Bale went for a world record transfer fee because an extremely hard-nosed club chairman took a hard line against a club president notoriously unwilling to take "no" for an answer when he wants a specific player. Perez wanted Bale - he may have felt Bale was necessary to make up for missing out on Neymar - and he was willing to pay through the nose to get him. That, as much as Bale's actual quality, produced the world record fee for which he eventually went. So right away, a comparison to any other fee not produced under comparable circumstances starts to look very dubious.

Now, here's the key point: if you're saying that fee entitles fans to expect a world-class player, fair enough. But if anyone expected Bale to play as well as Ronaldo, or even particularly close, just because their fees were comparable, that person's expectations were absurd. They were absurd for two reasons: first, Bale isn't as good as Ronaldo. He's probably never going to be quite as good as Ronaldo. There's certainly no shame in that, and I'm not afraid to admit it.

Second, and more importantly, nobody who shares a team with Ronaldo can play as well as Ronaldo. It's impossible. Bale exploded with Spurs because he was given specifically the license that Ronaldo has at Real Madrid: license to shoot at will, to take any free kicks he wants, to more or less do whatever he thinks necessary to get onto his left foot in front of goal. Two players on the same team can't be given that license, by definition; in order for a player like Ronaldo to get the attacking freedom that he has, everyone else has to be much more disciplined and selfless.

What this means is that Bale will never, ever be at his best while Ronaldo is on the pitch. It cannot happen. If you take a free-roaming attacking player with license to shoot from anywhere at any time, and you ask that player to perform as a much more orthodox winger and defer to another shooter, a couple things are going to happen. That player's production is going to drop, and when they try to correct that by acting a little selfish - as all great goalscorers sometimes do - they're going to run afoul of the big star, not to mention the fans.

Anyone who knew Bale well, who watched him carefully at Spurs, and who knew how Real Madrid were built around Ronaldo, should've been able to see this coming. Not only that, they should've been able to recognize, in Spurs-era Bale, a frequently inconsistent player who often drifted through games - only to rescue a result with a single explosive moment or sensational free-kick. This happened numerous times even during his best season at Spurs. If you take that player, and you remove a lot of the freedom (particularly the freedom to take free kicks) that permitted them to salvage their more indifferent performances, you're going to have to get used to watching them drift through some games. That's the product you purchased.

That's not to say Bale can't experience plain old poor form, and that he shouldn't be criticized when that happens. It's simply to say that a lot of his "struggles" at Real Madrid were completely inevitable, and to suggest that they're unacceptable in view of his transfer fee is not to be realistic.

tl;dr Bale has performed more or less how a rational observer would've predicted he'd perform, based on the conditions under which he thrived at Spurs and the conditions he was going to have to adjust to at RM. The player RM broke the bank to purchase is the same player they have, and if that isn't what they wanted it's not really his fault.