Perhaps it didn’t cross Cristiano Ronaldo’s mind that maybe this wasn’t the night to make it all about him.
Then again, is anyone even remotely surprised — given everything we know about Ronaldo, good and bad — that he did not care greatly if he was spoiling, and souring, and sabotaging one of the happier occasions for Manchester United this season?
They had won their final game before the World Cup, courtesy of a classic United storyline: a late winner scored by the latest player to roll off their seemingly endless conveyor belt of young talent. It felt like the moment Alejandro Garnacho introduced himself properly to the Premier League. And then, in the warm afterglow of that 2-1 win at Fulham, there was a show of mutiny that felt deliberately designed to cause maximum impact.
Maybe we should not be too surprised. Ronaldo, being Ronaldo, does what he pleases. It is part of what has made him so brilliant for so many years, among the small band of category-A superstars who can make you quicken your step on the way to see him.
But it is also one of his least attractive traits. It is a reminder that there is a difference between being a great footballer and a great football man. It is just a shame, perhaps, he has trouble sometimes amalgamating the two.
He says he feels “betrayed”. He wants everyone to know he has no respect for Erik ten Hag and that he thinks the United manager is trying to drive him out of the club. There are other people at Old Trafford, he says, who do not want him there.
He is sitting opposite a sympathetic Piers Morgan and the five-time Ballon d’Or winner is telling his interviewer that he, the great Cristiano, is the victim of a cruel sequence of events that, for the good of everyone, has to be made public.
And the more he pursues this kind of justification, the greater the suspicion that it is actually Ronaldo who is doing everything he possibly can to sever his ties with the club he professes to love.
The more he depicts himself as the victim, the more it becomes obvious that what he really wants is for the relevant people at Old Trafford to let him go.
It is Ronaldo who wants to force the issue. It is Ronaldo who has come to think of Old Trafford as a five-star prison. It is all a strategy, all carefully manoeuvred. It is about as subtle as a pneumatic drill.
This time, he might just have got his way, too. Realistically, can Ronaldo be allowed to wear United’s colours again when he has just put himself on television with the intention of chopping down Ten Hag and turning it into a popularity contest with the club’s supporters?
A club of United’s size would look feeble, to say the least, if they tried to fix a smile and ignored Sir Alex Ferguson’s advice, articulated many times by the most successful manager in the club’s history, that the minute a footballer starts to think he is bigger than the club there is only one conversation to have: goodbye.
Ten Hag has only started Ronaldo four times in the Premier League (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Yes, it is true United have a habit of redrawing the line every time Ronaldo crosses it. Yes, the last thing they want is a standoff with the player they believed, mistakenly, would make them credible title challengers. There just comes a time when the damage is irreparable. Today, it feels like we have reached that point.
Maybe, deep down, that is Ronaldo’s intention, too. He told us on August 16 that he was going to reveal “the truth” in an unspecified interview. Three months on, we can be sure now that he was not bluffing. And it is all so calculated and PR-driven and, more than anything, transparent in its motives.
The timing, just for starters. Ronaldo has been unwell, apparently, for the last week, meaning he did not play in United’s game at Fulham or the Carabao Cup tie against Aston Villa three days earlier. All the time, though, he knew that as soon as the World Cup break was underway, the bombshell was coming.
His choice of interviewer was, of course, someone who would be cosy rather than challenging and who has made it clear over the years that, for Cristiano, he is willing to wave the cheerleader’s pom poms.
Did Morgan, a former newspaper editor, ask Ronaldo about the game against Tottenham Hotspur on October 19 when the Portuguese did something that nobody in United’s entire history had ever done before?
Ronaldo, you may recall, was so aggrieved about being on the bench he walked down the tunnel, quit the game and deserted the stadium. Yet it is unclear at this stage whether Ronaldo was challenged in his interview — published in The Sun and shown in full on TalkTV later this week — about this rather extraordinary breach of discipline.
Was it mentioned that Ten Hag had appointed Ronaldo as captain just a few weeks later? Was it put to Ronaldo that it hardly fitted with the narrative that United’s manager had no respect for him?
“I don’t have respect for him because he doesn’t show respect for me,” said Ronaldo. “If you don’t have respect for me, I’m never going to have respect for you.”
Perhaps the bottom line here is that Ronaldo’s grievances all come from a state of mind whereby he is so used to getting his own way, so accustomed to being the superstar, to people fawning around him, laughing at his every joke and fluttering their eyelashes in his direction, his view of the world has become warped as a result. He views the rest of us from Planet Ronaldo. He likes it up there, letting off esteem.
This is the man who made it absolutely clear he did not want to remain at Old Trafford this season and have to turn out in the Europa League. Ronaldo has a large entourage. All sorts of stories have been leaked, via obliging journalists, about him wanting to leave.
“Since Sir Alex Ferguson left I saw no evolution in the club, the progress was zero.”
The initial leak came two days before United began pre-season training with their new manager in place. No thought was given to how it might undermine Ten Hag and cast a shadow over what was supposed to be a new start for everyone.
At the same time, it is a puzzle to know exactly what Ronaldo means when he says he has been “betrayed” — unless, of course, he is simply talking about not being in the starting XI every week.
Ronaldo seems to have forgotten how United trumpeted his arrival 15 months ago and how they were so eager to reunite him with his old No 7 shirt they persuaded Edinson Cavani to give it up.
Ronaldo conveniently overlooks that, for all his declarations of love towards United, he was trying to arrange a move to Manchester City before everything fell into place. He forgets his behaviour before joining Real Madrid in 2009 when he talked about feeling like “a slave” in Manchester and created enough of a bad feeling that there was a period when the crowd at Old Trafford stopped singing his name.
He says he had never heard of Ralf Rangnick, previously United’s interim manager, and it seems designed to belittle and ridicule. Rangnick might not be remembered affectionately by United’s supporters, but it feels gratuitous on Ronaldo’s part. It is a cheap shot and an insight into the issues that Rangnick must have encountered after the departure of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
Solskjaer was always happy to fluff Ronaldo’s ego. In return, Ronaldo’s criticisms of United do not extend to asking why, for all Solskjaer’s qualities, a former manager of Cardiff City and Molde was entrusted to take on Pep Guardiola at Manchester City and Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool.
As for the criticisms of Ten Hag, this is the really interesting part. Most United supporters would argue that Ten Hag has handled difficult challenges — including the various issues with Ronaldo — pretty well during his first few months in the job. His stock has been rising. These are still the getting-to-know-you stages and it is too early to say whether the former Ajax manager is going to bring back happier times to Old Trafford. But there are signs of improvement and the club’s supporters have, on the whole, appreciated his work.
More than that, football fans are not daft. The vast majority of United supporters surely know what is driving this. They know what makes Ronaldo tick and that, having been the main man for United, Real Madrid and Juventus, he cannot get used to the idea he is no longer a mandatory first-team pick. Every footballer has insecurities. Not even Ronaldo, with his formidable ego, is immune.
Amid all the politics and positioning, he also makes some good points about the club’s infrastructure and, though he does not name them in what we have seen so far, the failures under the Glazer family. Most observers will agree with his assessment that United have stagnated in the post-Ferguson years.
He mentions that he expected more empathy after the death of his baby son during childbirth.
But he also says United have turned him into the “black sheep” and it all seems to come back to him clinging to the idea that, a few months before his 38th birthday, he ought to be undroppable. Ronaldo’s self-regard does not seem to have been affected by the fact there was hardly a long queue of potential takers in the last transfer window.
He doesn’t seem to be aware of that famous old line from the US sports writer Wilfrid Diamond that age is the one opponent not even the greatest champion can beat. Or he seems convinced he can show it was never true. It is classic Ronaldo. He wears his stardom like a comfort blanket.
A more realistic assessment is that it is, in the best sense possible, almost freakish that he is still operating at the highest level. His career is a victory of endurance, longevity and his twitching, 24-7 obsession to outdo everyone else. But he is fading.
Nobody, it seems, wants to explain to him that maybe he is no longer the force of nature who bewitched crowds and bludgeoned opposition defences earlier in his career. Or maybe he just does not want to listen. In his book about Ronaldo, Guillem Balague writes how the player’s entourage quickly came to realise “they must keep criticism at a distance, or control it, create the narrative and keep him on his pedestal”. His agent, Jorge Mendes, is always there to tell Ronaldo he is better than Lionel Messi and whatever else he wants to hear.
On Twitter last night, a debate centred on whether Ronaldo had unfollowed Garnacho on social media and whether it was because the teenager had marked his goal at Fulham with a Messi-style celebration, removing his shirt and holding it up for the crowd to see his name.
Would Ronaldo really be that petty?
All that can really be said is his latest interview feels like the endgame for Ronaldo and Manchester United and that nobody should be taken in by what he says.
Ronaldo has been planning this moment for some time and, judging by his list of complaints, it is no wonder he has been absent recently through illness. The poor chap must have a dreadful headache when his halo is stuck on so tight. (The Athletic)
