Well, nobody saw that coming. Who could have known, who could have guessed that Cristiano Ronaldo was in fact a wildly solipsistic egomaniac?
Were there, you wonder vaguely, some signs, some subtle hints along the way? Perhaps, in the end we never really knew him at all.
Looking back now it all started so well for Ronaldo. It started with the cakes. The cakes were massive.
“I will tell you now, not one player touched the apple crumble and custard, not one player went up for that brownie because everybody was sat down and one of the lads said to me: ‘What has Cristiano got on his plate?’”
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The words of reserve goalkeeper Lee Grant after Ronaldo’s first sight of the players’ Friday night dessert trolley in August last year.
And at least we know now what Ronaldo had on his plate, besides a large, sickly-sweet portion of Cristiano Ronaldo. The head of Ralf Rangnick for a start, and more recently the head of Erik ten Hag, judging by the tone of Ronaldo’s let-it-all-burn interview with the celebrity homunculus Piers Morgan.
The thing with the cakes, we were told at the time, was about discipline, standards, setting an example. It isn’t clear how this model state of professionalism intersects with such a vicious and destructive set of public comments, a screed of quivering self-pity and hysterical scalpel-plunging dropped on the manager, players and supporters just as Manchester United had seemed to be getting somewhere.
The top line seems to be that Ronaldo feels “betrayed” by United. The same United who are currently paying him more than the entire annual TV rights deal of the Women’s Super League to sit on the bench not being quite good enough any more; the same club he tried to leave in the summer; a club that is now simply treating him with the same baseline level of objective favour as every other player in any first team squad anywhere. That kind of betrayal?
Elsewhere Ronaldo moans about the state of the gym. Some sort of shed also seems to have offended him. At one point Morgan keeps saying “they’re trying to get rid of you” in urgent, thrilled tones, as though this is all a transcript of an FBI wire sting and Ronaldo is cowering behind a door about to be gagged, tied, thrown in the back of a Pontiac saloon and dumped in the New Jersey woodlands.
And really it is hard to know whether the correct response is hilarity, revulsion or sadness.
Certainly the blend of Morgan and Ronaldo presents an acme of something indigestible, like having a concentrated blend of margarine, vanity, bile and preening self-regard injected directly into your eyeballs by a team of expert sadists.
But essentially Ronaldo’s problem is that he is no longer an elite-level footballer, that he is instead peripheral to an improving team, and that he appears to have no one around to tell him this.
Ronaldo is at least helping to root out the waste at United by ensuring his own departure
We should, of course, all remember that it has been a terribly sad and bruising year for him personally. And yet at the same time there is good news here. The good news is that Ronaldo is 100% correct, if perhaps not in the way he intended.
Manchester United have been a debauched ship, a celebrity waxwork museum, treated for too long like an asset to be sluiced and sucked dry. Where Ronaldo is wrong is that he, Cristiano Ronaldo, is not the cure for this. He is instead the obvious symptom, and the single greatest human embodiment of this decay.
If Ronaldo really wants to root out some of the waste and entitlement he is at least going about it the right way by single-handedly ensuring his own departure. Only by ridding Manchester United of Ronaldo can Ronaldo hope to remedy some of the problems he, Ronaldo, correctly identifies. This is some of the best news the club has had in some time. Ronaldo feels alienated. Here, finally is a sign that the antidote might be starting to bite.
At this point it is worth remembering why Ronaldo was signed in the first place. In the summer of 2021 there was huge unhappiness about the direction of the club.
Faced with insurrection, the owners offered up Ronaldo in the manner of an adulterous double glazing magnate buying his wife a sparkly necklace shortly after she stumbled across his Tinder account. Forget the pain. Just keep looking at the shiny thing.
Ronaldo was signed despite the fact that culturally and tactically he was anathema to the idea of building a new team and a new identity. On the pitch he is, as they said at Juventus, the solution to the problem he causes, reducing the entire team to his personalised Ronaldo vehicle.
Much is made of his fine goalscoring record but the wider picture is United scored 50 goals in 35 league games in his one full season, and without him 73 the season before. With Ronaldo other attackers fell off a cliff and the system congealed.
Fast forward to now and United look better than they have in years without him in the team. It requires a striking level of cognitive dissonance, or outright celebrity worship, to conclude it is United who are holding Ronaldo back.
It is also necessary at this point is to applaud Ten Hag for some masterful management of a difficult squad member, for remaining so unruffled by the sulks and the hissy-fits that he has in effect forced Ronaldo to blink first. And to applaud Morgan too for parroting this stuff so uncritically, for simply projecting his own fawning approval.
The result is a kind of clarity. Here is the truth. Here is the product, the persona that we have collectively created and indulged.
Shortly after Ronaldo’s arrival, Gary Neville of Sky and BeIN Sports seemed to suggest not just United, not just football, but the entire nation had been electrified just by his presence on these shores. Little wonder Ronaldo has trouble keeping – let’s say – a sense of scale.
Nothing will be solved by any of this. The people who invested in Ronaldo as an emergency marketing tool will stay in place. Manchester United will remain an ailing commercial brand under the current ownership.
But small details can make a big difference on the pitch. Ten Hag, who is basically a serious, careful person trying to do a serious, careful job has looked at this with a clear eye.
Ronaldo has successfully and publicly identified the Ronaldo-fication of United. It feels like progress.
- Guardian
