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Opinion
On 31 December 2022, appropriately the last day of the old year and a contrived end of an era for all of us, I saw a headline that Cristiano Ronaldo had signed with Saudi Arabian club Al-Nassr.
In sporting terms I found this incredibly sad. Make no mistake, leaving Europe is an elite football player’s demise. It is Cristiano Ronaldo’s football death.
Ronaldo doesn’t particularly have the personality to get an outside observer on his side, unless you admire his sheer work ethic, ultra-disciplined dedication and desire to be the best football player, probably at the expense of any real friendships.
He neither has the charm of namesake Ronaldo, nor the cool dude-ness of Kylian Mbappe or Neymar in his early years, or even the enigmatic detached introspection of Lionel Messi. Ronaldo has at times shown an inability to recognise either where his declining ability fits him into his teams of 2022, and in the past an inability to recognise the achievements of smaller teams in his path such as Iceland and Atletico Madrid.
But Ronaldo could also occasionally be an antidote to the machismo of the rest of the sporting world, refusing to get tattoos so that he could continue to donate blood and bone marrow to people in need.
On-field he has been an incredible champion, in longevity, sheer number of goals scored, his ability to bring three of his teams to the very top (Manchester United, Real Madrid and Portugal, the least likely of the three) and curiously, the only major star since perhaps Pele who was any good at using his head to score goals.
Spiritually I can hardly believe that it has ended like this for him. Unlike Lionel Messi circa 2016, I have never had cause to doubt Ronaldo’s credentials as a fighter. I figured they would have to cart him off a high-level European playing field in a casket aged 52.
At minimum I thought he would find a late-career challenge with a mid-level side such as his first club Sporting Lisbon, though this thought experiment requires an unrealistic lowering of salary in the real world.
I can hardly believe that anyone as rich and ambitious as him could be swayed by mere money. But both in the cases of him and Mbappe, I seem to be wrong.
Since winning the Champions League in his final game with Real Madrid in 2018, the last five club seasons have admittedly not gone so well for Ronaldo. Arguably the three-month pandemic pause in 2020 is a neat cut-off point after which he stopped being able to win elite matches singlehandedly.
Nonetheless, 2021 saw all of these events occur:
1) However dubious it is (or would be) to win a tournament Golden Boot via a bunch of penalties, Ronaldo was the Golden Boot winner for highest scorer of the European Championship played in June 2021.
2) Ronaldo, once again eternally alongside Messi (who transferred to PSG), was the highest-profile club transfer of the 2021 off-season, moving from Juventus to Manchester United.
(Photo by Oleg Bilsagaev/Getty Images)
3) He rescued four Champions League matches in a row for Manchester United with late goals from September-November 2021.
Since then, in 2022 the entire CR7 show has smacked straight into a wall.
Analyst Michael Cox summed up 2020s Ronaldo best when he reasoned that any team with him on it will start the match a goal up but a man down, as Ronaldo was guaranteed to score most matches but is too old to help with any defensive pressing.
While his league goal stats were a more than healthy 30 even in his last year with Juventus in 2021, Juve declined from heavily chasing Champions League titles from 2015-18 to being booted by Ajax, Lyon and Porto, a clear Tier B, in Ronaldo’s three years with them.
Eventually in 2022 the decline, hastened by Manchester United’s dreadful post-Sir Alex Ferguson dysfunction, spread from Ronaldo’s teams around him to his own game. Whatever the insipid city of Manchester turf wars, Ronaldo will bitterly regret not joining Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City in 2021 for one more attempt at what playing for an elite club feels like, under the guru of 21st century coaching and methodology.
In terms of the body’s mechanics, Ronaldo’s fall doesn’t necessarily surprise me. Even Roger Federer, slightly older than Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, could not keep pace with them forever, in the other sport where two or three stars have held onto the mantle for multiple generations.
Roger Federer (Photo by Luke Walker/Getty Images for Laver Cup)
Stars often age in two ways. The types who rely heavily on their pace and athleticism to be stars suddenly fall off a cliff at a certain point of their careers, such as Thierry Henry, another who prematurely decamped from Europe to the USA aged 33. We are likely witnessing this phenomenon with Ronaldo, who while being an excellent dribbler and shooter, could in the past always count on his pace and magnificent leap.
Meanwhile those canny types who never relied on pace in the first place, such as Zinedine Zidane, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Lionel Messi, could theoretically play on and on, floating into the right positions using sixth sense and picking their moments as Messi did in 2022.
Another way to look at things is that Ronaldo is 37, soon 38, with a two-year gap on Messi. Ronaldo arguably had two years as a star, 2007 and 2008, before Messi emerged at his level. We are perhaps witnessing the inverse two years of this.
Sports fans are loathe to admit any off-field hindering having any effect on a player’s on-field greatness. If they are good enough they will emerge from the ghetto to win three World Cups, we think.
To this day Johan Cruyff is accused of lacking bottle and ambition for not chasing the 1978 World Cup, while meanwhile saving his marriage. As well as Argentina played, perhaps a virus really did decide the 2022 World Cup against France. And then, there is also a chance the pain of losing a baby in April 2022 brought Cristiano Ronaldo down for good.
Which brings us to the major career goal Ronaldo cares deeply about: his legacy. What has happened at the 2022 World Cup will set Messi above Ronaldo forever, when career-wise the two were still exactly neck-and-neck as recently as October 2022, both fading from the world scene in the 2020s in almost identical ways until two months ago.
Their last tussle that mattered was Messi holding up his shirt to the Bernabeu crowd in April 2017, or perhaps a 2-2 between the clubs a year later as Ronaldo was about to win a third-consecutive Champions League, inspiring me to briefly write his name first when listing the rivalry.
There was also one last irrelevant moment in late 2020, in front of empty stadiums while the rest of us were more concerned with lockdowns and vaccines. With Barcelona and Juventus in the same Champions League group, the two competed in their geriatric way by scoring some penalties for their declining clubs.
I once wrote an article for The Roar that suggested Messi and Ronaldo would be remembered as a tandem. That is not true now. Ronaldo’s 2022 World Cup was terrible, as he had lost the spring in his step to latch on the through balls of yesteryear.
This is easily contrasted with watching Messi picking his moments to stroll around the fields of Qatar, in his guise in midfield setting the pace of all his matches, putting in Argentina’s umpteen penalties and unbelievably lifting a gold trophy aged 35.
It was massively symbolic that when a Portugal coach finally found the gumption to drop Ronaldo from Portugal’s starting lineup in Qatar, young replacement forward Goncalo Ramos scored a hat-tr
(Photo by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
But Ronaldo maintained a fanbase in the crowd, who collectively begged for his inclusion at the expense of that other hat-trick no-name who apparently no one cared about. It was perhaps also appropriate that the end came against Morocco, an unknown team that symbolised newness and beat Portugal on the back of youthful dynamism at the right moments.
I would argue that geo-politically, Portugal (population 10 million) achieving their first-ever major championship by winning Euro 2016 is a big an achievement as Argentina winning a World Cup. But the narrative will not back me up. Messi winning the World Cup aged 35, at his fifth and final attempt, with all of those goals and crazy assists, is the greatest football story of all time.
Ronaldo does have numbers. He has double the individual European Championship goals of almost any other player. He won three consecutive Champions Leagues, and five overall. He won them with two clubs, unlike Messi. He has all of those Ballons d’Or.
Yet the same Real Madrid side somehow also won one this year without him, albeit miraculously. Cristiano ripped through world football for two decades and for a while eclipsed the memory of his Brazilian namesake. But with the world momentarily in a World Cup mood, the Ronaldo vibe drifts back to the gap-toothed one in the yellow shirt.
Meanwhile, Cristiano is playing in Saudi Arabia. He is off the scene. It’s over. And we his fans don’t even get the benefit of realising that.
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