RONALDO JOINS JUVENTUS, AND EVERYBODY WINS
Portuguese’s decision might prove a harbinger of a return to halcyon age in Serie A, writes Rory Smith
Italy’s Serie A has seemed a league cowed by the memory of what it used to be, unable to live up to the gilded ghosts of its past. Suddenly, now, it feels like the centre of the universe again thanks to the arrival of the man who has changed everything: Cristiano Ronaldo.
This spring, when Juventus bosses agreed to commit some US$387 million to signing Ronaldo, the reigning world player of the year — a $133 million transfer fee for Real Madrid and, roughly, $254 million in salary and taxes over the next four seasons — they did not do so to boost Serie A’s self-esteem.
They did so, partly, because the 33-year-old Ronaldo represented the club’s best chance of ending its long, agonising wait to win a third Champions League title.
Juventus have lost two of the last four finals, to Barcelona in 2015 and to Real Madrid and Ronaldo in 2017.
Despite seven straight Serie A titles under his stewardship, to Juventus Andrea Agnelli going one step further in Europe now ranks as somewhere between a mission and an obsession.
This summer, the club jettisoned their long-standing policy of slow, steady growth in favour of immediate success: Agnelli brought Leonardo Bonucci, the Italy defender, back to Turin after a season at AC Milan and, more important, worked with Jorge Mendes, Ronaldo’s agent, to complete what has been called il colpo del secolo: the deal of the century.
Ronaldo has won three Champions Leagues in a row, and five overall. He is the competition’s all-time leading scorer. If anyone can deliver European domination, he can.
At Ronaldo’s age, though, even Juventus might have balked at the cost of the move — and in particular that four-year contract; by the time it ends, Ronaldo will be 37 — if it was not for the commercial, and financial, benefits a player of his unique profile can bring to his club.
That started to manifest even before the deal had been announced: Juventus’ share price soared with the first whispers that a move might be imminent.
Though reports that Juventus have sold 500,000 jerseys in the six weeks since his arrival are incorrect — that would be “impossible,” according to one club executive — they already have sold more jerseys this summer than they did in the whole of last season.
The club have sold 29,300 season tickets, too, despite substantial price increases from last year.
If anything, though, the impact on social media has been more impressive.
Ronaldo has almost 335 million followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; as Juventus had hoped, a fraction of those have migrated to the club’s accounts with their new signing.
The club added four million new followers on Instagram in the weeks since Ronaldo signed, and an extra two million likes on Facebook (curiously, there has been a much less dramatic uptick on Twitter: only an additional 150,000 followers).
Juventus had more YouTube views than any football club in the world in July. All of that has a real impact; all of it can be tangibly monetised, by selling access to those accounts to sponsors.
According to a report by the accountancy firm KPMG, the club can expect an increase of some €75 million to €100 million in commercial revenue over the first three years of Ronaldo’s contract, thanks largely to increased opportunities in Asia, where Ronaldo’s brand is considerably more appealing than the club’s.
Juventus’ rivals, on the surface, should dread that economic impact. This is a club, after all, that has already outstripped all of its domestic opponents on and off the field, a team that is so secure in its domestic primacy that it can afford to focus almost exclusively on European success.
Bolstered by the most eye-catching signing by an Italian team since Inter Milan signed the Brazilian Ronaldo in 1998, Juventus should cement their grip on Serie A.
After the most enthralling title race in years last season, it is hard to envisage a sustained challenge over the coming months.
As Lazio’s Ciro Immobile, the league’s leading scorer last season, put it: “It’s lucky I topped the scoring charts in time.”
That, though, is not how most of Italy sees it.
“It adds more salt and pepper,” said Aurelio De Laurentiis, the president of Napoli, the team that finished a close second to Juventus last season.
James Pallotta, the owner of Roma, has described Ronaldo’s arrival as “positive for Serie A” — he insisted that he did not see it as something negative for his club, a putative challenger, at all.
There is a pride, of course, almost a validation, in having the reigning world player of the year choose Serie A.
Not since 1995, when Hristo Stoitchkov left Barcelona for Parma, has the holder of the Ballon d’Or moved to Italy. And there is a hope, too, that Ronaldo’s decision might prove a harbinger of a return to a halcyon age.
“He gives a lustre to the whole championship,” said Gianpiero Gasperini, coach of Atalanta. “A return to the past, when great players arrived.”
Luciano Spalletti, Gasperini’s counterpart at Inter Milan, suggested the signing gave Serie A “the air of great football.”
But the excitement is not only rooted in nostalgia and yearning, in intangible emotion and rootless hope: there is a sense of economic opportunity, too.
As Christoph Winterling, the commercial and marketing director at Bologna, said, for Serie A, “Ronaldo is a game-changer.”