Gareth Bale, Wales men’s all-time leading goalscorer and a five-times Champions League winner with Real Madrid, has announced his retirement from football. Bale, one of Britain’s most decorated players, has stepped away from the game midway through his contract at Los Angeles FC, which was due to expire this summer.

Bale’s decision comes little more than a month after he vowed to continue playing after Wales’s disappointing group-stage exit at their first World Cup for 64 years. Bale captained Wales on his first appearance at a World Cup finals.
“My decision to retire from international football has been by far the hardest of my career,” Bale said. “My journey on the international stage is one that has changed not only my life but who I am.”

Bale started at Southampton, making his debut aged 16, and spent six years at Tottenham before joining Madrid in 2013 for a then world-record £85m fee. He had indicated as recently as November that he would play on until at least the end of Wales’s Euro 2024 qualifying campaign. Bale scored 41 goals in 111 international appearances.

In a separate statement on social media Bale said: “After careful and thoughtful consideration I announce my immediate retirement from club and international football.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to have achieved my dream of playing the sport I love. It has truly given me some of the best moments of my life. The highest of highs over 17 seasons that will be impossible to replicate, no matter what the next chapter has in store for me.”

It means Bale’s final game was November’s 3-0 defeat by England in Qatar, in which he was substituted at half-time. Afterwards Rob Page, the Wales manager, was confident Bale would stay true to his word. “I don’t think it will be the last time you see Gareth in a Wales jersey,” Page said.

Page previously said Wales’s senior players such as Bale and Aaron Ramsey had assured him they would not retire at the same time. “We want Gareth to stay involved as long as he can,” Page said in September. “You can’t go from them having a big influence to a big chunk of them leaving. They have promised they will not leave together.”

Arguably Bale’s greatest moment came on the biggest stage in club football, with his stunning overhead-kick goal against Liverpool in the Champions League final in 2018, the first of his two goals in Kyiv, influential in recording victory. His match-winning goal against Barcelona in the 2014 Copa del Rey final brought similar acclaim. Bale picked up the ball on halfway before sprinting off the pitch and past Marc Bartra, who had equalised, before returning to the field and slotting home the winner.

His sensational double for Wales against Austria in their World Cup playoff semi-final in Cardiff last March also was pivotal on his country’s path to the World Cup finals. “I am stepping back, but not away from the team that lives in me and runs through my veins,” Bale said. “After all, the dragon on my shirt is all I need.”