Ronaldo legacy trashed but United look like proper football club again
WHEN Manchester United re-signed Cristiano Ronaldo in the summer of 2021, it was impossible to predict the moment he would march along the touchline like a petulant child and disappear down the tunnel while his team-mates were still fighting to secure a victory on the pitch. But it was always obvious it would end in tears and tantrums.
It was impossible to predict that a 37-year-old superstar whose best days were long gone before United signed him again, but who is still earning an obscene amount in wages because of the player he once was, would refuse to come on as a substitute against Spurs in front of close to 74,000 fans. But it was always obvious he was a man with a pram and a lot of toys to throw out of it.
What we could identify with absolute certainty, though, was that the re-signing of Ronaldo 14 wasted months ago was a desperate move by a dysfunctional club. It bore the imprint of the dead hand of the Glazers, a signing that was all about image, commercial value, clicks and trending on Twitter, a signing that has set the club’s recovery back two more years.
And if you doubt that appraisal, maybe study the events of the summer, when Ronaldo’s representatives tried as best they could to hawk their client to other teams and were met with silence and polite refusals from a series of Europe’s leading clubs. United took him because they have been serial dupes in the transfer market. No one else took a second look.
Ronaldo is one of the greats of the game, one of the best footballers there has ever been, a player second only to Lionel Messi in his generation, a prodigious talent who has brought joy to millions.
But that was then. This is now and these days, anyone with a brain and a scintilla of ambition of winning the game’s major trophies wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole. ‘In top sport, it is about today,’ United’s manager Erik ten Hag said on Friday. ‘It is not about age or reputation.’
As Ronaldo’s fans groaned at the injustice of it all, the rest of us rejoiced in the fact that United appear to have found at last a manager who has the confidence and the character to set the tone at Old Trafford. Ronaldo (right) appeared to think he was running the show. He now knows different.
Sure, he scored some goals last season but United were a worse team with him in the side than they had been the season before. United finished second in the Premier League in the 2020-21 season and scored 73 goals. Last season, with the team built around Ronaldo, the progress of United’s youngsters withered. United finished sixth and scored only 57 goals. As they say in the States, go figure.
Some of Ronaldo’s supporters still seem to think he deserves to start every match because he was once a great player, a strange kind of logic. Let’s put Alan Shearer up front next to him. He could bang them in once upon a time, too. It is sad that Ronaldo’s ego has grown so monstrous he cannot accept that sooner or later, age catches
up with every athlete, even one as imperious as him. On Friday, Ronaldo released a message on Instagram that was as close to an apology as he could bear. Which meant it wasn’t really an apology at all. It was more of an attempt to justify walking off during the Spurs game.
It was unfortunate for the Portugal star, then, that Ten Hag reminded everyone the next day that it was the second time Ronaldo had pulled a stunt like this.
He left Old Trafford during a pre-season game against Rayo Vallecano, too, so what happened at Spurs was not an isolated incident. It is a shame that his behaviour is vindicating those who have long claimed Ronaldo is all about the individual, not the team. It is a shame that he is tainting everything he has achieved, right at the end of his career.
The irony is that Ronaldo’s implosion, and in particular the way Ten Hag has dealt with it, may represent the best thing that has happened to United for some time. It feels as if maybe they are on the verge of becoming a football club again, a place where celebrity and reputation no longer matter more than the contribution a player can make on the pitch. It feels as if United may be about to become a team again, not a collection of overpaid, overentitled individuals, which is what they have been reduced to for much of the decade that has elapsed since Sir Alex Ferguson retired.
Ten Hag has shown the determination to confront Ronaldo and it appears that the club have backed the manager over their prime commercial asset. That, finally, represents progress.
It was, perhaps, not a coincidence that on the evening Ronaldo flounced down the tunnel at Old Trafford, United produced their best display of the season. In years to come, maybe we will see what happened at Old Trafford on Wednesday night and Ronaldo’s subsequent exile from the team at Chelsea last night as a turning point, the moment when United finally stopped looking backwards and started looking forwards.