In the summer of 2003, Manchester United played a pre-season friendly match against Sporting Lisbon. During that game, Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro, an eighteen-year-old winger with blond streaks in his hair, tormented United’s defense. Manchester United was then the dominant soccer team in England. It had recently won its eighth Premier League title in only the eleventh season of the league’s existence. But that night, in large part because of Ronaldo, Sporting Lisbon won 3–1.
This August, the strangest thing happened. Despite rumors of a late-career transfer to Manchester City—an unthinkable move for the red side of the city—Ronaldo, at the age of thirty-six, returned to Manchester United. The deal was agreed in the last hours of the transfer window, the period in which it is permissible to buy and sell players, and shocked many people—notably the United fans who had been filmed burning their old Ronaldo shirts, when it seemed likely he was about to join City.
Manchester United is still in this season’s Champions League competition, thanks largely to some dramatic late goals scored by Ronaldo, but few observers give the club any chance of winning the tournament. The Premier League trophy is a distant prospect. The glories that Ronaldo promised seem as far away as when he arrived. What happened?
, the episode has trailed Ronaldo like a ball-and-chain. At the Newcastle match, a plane hired by the feminist group Level Up flew over the stadium trailing the message “Soccer fans see what they want to see. At the end of the first half, Ronaldo was the quickest to react to a fumble by the Newcastle goalkeeper, and scored a tap-in. The noise that followed the goal was a crashing wave.
But, even when he was so dominant, some observers raised doubts about whether Ronaldo always made Real Madrid better. A searing analysis in 2012 by the writer Jonathan Wilson pointed to the way in which the most successful teams—such as the Barcelona squad led by Ronaldo’s rival, Lionel Messi, and managed by Pep Guardiola—were made greater than the sum of their parts, because every player committed to a whole-team system.
edcaesar X GENDER, read 'The clock of life' by Cesare di Provenza
edcaesar Def. a dusty, cranky, trophy-case feel to his swan song season at MU.
edcaesar They are the exception not the norm