Things often don’t end well. One of the symptoms of modern life is that people simply don’t want the things they love to come to an end — they expect them to continue for ever, so it’s hard to take when they do, and those negative emotions spill into the very thing they once cherished.
Take Game of Thrones, for instance. For seven seasons and seven years the TV show’s creators, David Benioff and DB Weiss, kept the masses on tenterhooks telling stories of how the factions of power in Westeros vied for control of the Iron Throne, only for the final season to feel a bit… meh? It was widely panned by critics, torn to shreds on social media (for what it’s worth, I thought it wasn’t bad).
It’s as though Cristiano Ronaldo is going through something similar right now. He is blaming all those around him – the script writers, the directors, the makeup artists – while failing to realise that, perhaps, the main protagonist is the one causing the show to bomb. That the ageing megastar – Ronaldo is now 37 – is being outshone by the younger hopefuls ready to take his stage.
You could see the thinking behind that triumphant return to Manchester United in 2021. The club which made him a star had fallen on hard times and, after winning almost everything the game has to offer in England, Spain and Italy, it would be one final grand achievement to add to his collection: returning United to its former glory.
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Luke Shaw gives England fans an unwelcome concern as Man Utd scrape past Fulham13 November, 2022And he made a pretty good go of it. Eighteen Premier League goals – third most last season – was no mean feat, but it’s no match for Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, the epitome of the successful modern club who share in their collective endeavours and spread goals and assists widely. Ronaldo’s goals were great, but it wasn’t enough for Manchester United to mount any kind of title challenge or avoid early exits from club competitions.
In fact, it’s possible he was even part of the problem, the fulcrum of the team who cared more about his own individual performance than that of anyone else around him. A hindrance who made playing the sort of team football that runs through Guardiola’s veins an impossibility.
“At one stage we just had to find compromises,” Ralf Rangnick, who was head coach of United for much of last season, said. “Cristiano scored a few goals but, again, Cristiano – and I’m not blaming him at all, he did great in those games – but he’s not a pressing monster.
“He’s not a player – even when he was a young player – he was not a young player who was crying, shouting ‘Hurray, the other team has got the ball, where can we win balls?'”
Ronaldo describing Rangnick as “this guy” who “is not even a coach” in the interview he gave with Piers Morgan that set a flamethrower to his Manchester United legacy suggests what Ronaldo made of those comments.
The problem for Ronaldo isn’t everyone around him, but that football simply isn’t the game it once was when he was emerging under Sir Alex Ferguson, developing from that spindly winger who had too many step-overs and not enough end product to one of football’s greatest ever players.
Because he will, of course, be remembered as one of football’s greats (not as great as Lionel Messi, especially after that interview). But even some of the great stories do not end satisfactorily. Look at War of the Worlds, HG Wells’s alien takeover epic that concludes with the aliens killed off by… the bacteria on Earth. An ending that was somehow made even worse by the Hollywood movie, where Tom Cruise miraculously manages to reunite with his family (even Spielberg admitted it was rubbish).
Every player must experience what Ronaldo is going through at some point in their career. And it’s not easy: coming to terms with your own mortality, realising the legs aren’t as nimble, that opponents are suddenly beating you to balls you expected to reach first, that decision-making is that fraction-of-a-second slower.
It’s not only the body, but the mind, too. Ageing snooker players speak of the difficulty in finishing off frames and matches that they didn’t experience in earlier life.
But older footballers can gradually come to terms with their limitations, maybe not agree when they are put on the bench but act with dignity, set an example to younger players who grew up watching their highlight reels on YouTube, mentor them even.
Ronaldo hasn’t been “betrayed” – as he said in the Morgan interview – by Erik ten Hag, the manager who has frequently dropped him and punished him for disrespecting his team-mates, or Manchester United’s executives.
He is simply not the player he once was. And he isn’t dealing with it well. Although even the greats don’t always go out in the way you expect. No one could have predicted Zinedine Zidane would headbutt Italy’s Marco Materazzi to conclude his final game for France in the 2006 World Cup final. But at least Zidane’s headbutt was over in a flash.
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