Be real. The star perfomers for wales were players like joe allen a stoke player... the next best player for wales was aaron ramsey a player who was good at best.
13 years of dominance ? Was he really a deciding factor in all of them.
In those 13 seasons if you rated the importance of all the united players and ranked them. How far down till you would get to giggs ?
Joe Allen was never the second best player for us. Ashley Williams, Wayne Hennessey or Ramsey (a core right down the centre which any decent team need) ... qualifying and tournament. And in the tournament itself, Bale was still clearly no.1 but after that, the entire squad stepped up.. including Allen tbf.
The issues Wales had with qualifying previously were varied ... smaller groups, regularly being lumped in with Holland, Italy, Germany and one team qualifying (though we should have topped Germany once), a disjointed team (Giggs, Hughes, Rush, Saunders was some front four but no balance), team - incl Giggs - not stepping up the way the 2015/16 squad did, a missed penalty, etc, etc. No excuses though, not good enough. Bale lifted that team up.
Ask the Welsh and it would be a very easy answer I suspect.
Bale crawls over broken glass to play for them and prefers it to even playing for Real Madrid these days!
I'm Welsh. There's no argument that Bale was phenomenal in our Euro 2016 qualifying and tournament.... if you're talking international performances, it's not close, it's Bale.
Club ... I think Bale has had some well publicised star moments, goals in CL finals for example but flits in and out of games - maybe because his teammates don't use him enough, maybe because he doesn't go looking for the ball. For me, Giggs was involved in games a lot more, and for a LOT more years.
Giggs also seems to be tarred with the longevity brush like "he was good, he had 20 seasons of 6 or 7/10". He was much more than that... 150/160 PL assists?
It's probably closer than first glance but it's still Giggs for me.