United they’ll challenge again
Ronaldo’s return is a message to all of Man U’s rivals,
They say you should never go back to your ex. Chances are you know someone that has re-entered a romantic relationship with a former partner during the COVID-19 pandemic. The success rate of those rekindled love affairs is rather poor. But none of those lovers won four Champions League trophies in their time apart.
Soccer is a soap opera, filled with love triangles and villains, drama and heartbreak. Just when you think you know what’s going to happen, the unthinkable occurs instead. The world fell in love with a young Cristiano Ronaldo in a Manchester United shirt. Now, at 36, 12 years after leaving for Real Madrid and then Juventus, Ronaldo has returned.
American politician Bernie Sanders famously said “everything is impossible until it happens.” In this summer transfer window, impossible happened twice. So maybe one can go back to one’s ex and fall in love all over again.
In less than 48 hours, Ronaldo, a five-time Ballon d’Or winner as the sport’s best player, asked to leave Italian giant Juventus and was offered to super spenders Manchester City for a measly $37 million, while much of the soccer world wondered how Paris SaintGermain
could pass up the opportunity to pair Ronaldo with the newly signed Lionel Messi. And before you paused your workday to break for lunch, Manchester United, which had not been in the conversation at all, had secured Ronaldo’s return to Old Trafford.
Unlike Messi’s heartfelt departure from Barcelona, there were no tears of sadness from Ronaldo. An Instagram post thanking the club and Juventus fans for being a “part of (his) history” was good enough. Juventus never made it past the Champions League quarterfinals in Ronaldo’s three seasons at the club, crashing out in the round of 16 the last two seasons. Now, Manchester United hopes Ronaldo can restore the legendary club’s status as one of Europe’s best. It is a massive gamble, for both sides.
A reported $30-million transfer fee is a bargain price for one of biggest names on the planet. But that number doesn’t include Ronaldo’s rumoured $46-million annual salary for the next two years, for a player that turns 37 in February. And United hasn’t even flirted with winning the Champions League in a decade. It was just three months ago the club lost in the final of the Europa League, UEFA’s second-tier continental competition.
Does Ronaldo’s return decrease the odds of United crashing out in the Champions
League group stage for the second year in a row? Yes, and you can take that to the bank. But the Premier League is a faster and much more technical league than it was when Ronaldo left for Real Madrid in 2009. Defenders are more athletic and read the game differently than when he embarrassed defences as a youngster, scoring 84 goals in 196 appearances en route to three Premier League titles.
What has made Ronaldo such a remarkable, rare breed of elite athlete, much like LeBron James or Tom Brady, is that we’ve never seen a decline in performance. Several greats returned to their beloved teams and were unable to recapture the magic that made them great — Didier Drogba at Chelsea, Thierry Henry at Arsenal, Robbie Fowler at Liverpool.
But Ronaldo is no ordinary elite athlete, and this has not been an ordinary transfer window. European champion Chelsea reacquired forward Romelu Lukaku from Inter Milan for a record $170 million just three weeks ago. He scored in his first game back at Chelsea, after scoring 24 league goals for Italian champion Inter last season. Ronaldo scored a league-best 29 goals for Juventus.
Ronaldo doesn’t need to break goal records at Manchester United. He is the only United player to score more than 30 goals in a Premier League season — 31 in 2007-2008 — and it’s unlikely he’ll hit that mark again. But, Thursday night, it seemed so very likely that Ronaldo would turn up in Manchester this weekend to dawn the sky blue of Manchester City, a move that to many would have been the ultimate downfall for United, proving it no longer had the prestige or commercial money and power over the once “noisy neighbours.”
Manchester United had to sign Ronaldo much the same way PSG had to sign Messi, once he became available. The circumstances were different but the significance the same.
Complete mismanagement at Barcelona saw the Spanish club lose one of the greatest players to ever play the sport, and financial good fortune allowed PSG to pull off one of the most shocking transfers in sports history. It seemed too good to be true, and was an opportunity the Qatari-owned French giant could not pass up. That’s exactly how the Glazers will justify the return of Ronaldo.
Manchester United could not afford to let a club legend sign with its fiercest rival and impede its progression as a club. Whether the result is a fourth Champions League title is irrelevant really. The move keeps United among the elite, and in a sport dictated by money that’s the only thing that matters.