Cristiano Ronaldo lands on victory, the next stop in football’s escape from reality | Cristiano Ronaldo

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It would be very easy, not to mention cheap and absurd, to laugh and mock Cristiano Ronaldo now.

However, I think we should still laugh and laugh at Cristiano Ronaldo, if only because laughter is probably as good a response as any week when Ronaldo confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is definitely there for the kids – and no, not for the money – by signing for Al Nassr. in Riyadh on a staggering £173m-a-year sports entertainment deal.

On one level, you just have to laugh at the weirdness of this. This is a move that has nothing to do with elite professional sport but also indicates quite clearly where this world is headed.

But it’s fundamentally very funny, in the way that the late, sulky Ronaldo is funny when viewed as a real-time study in extreme, uninhibited human selfishness. Here’s a footballer interviewing a celebrity on his way out of Manchester United while preaching about disrespectful behavior to others (Source: That horrific TV ‘interview’, an experience comparable to being repeatedly stabbed through the eyeballs with a hot kebab skewer made of pure human greed).

How would this work on Earth? How long before Ronaldo is dropped for not pressing enough to meet the basic standards of Saudi PR football? How long before pictures of him appearing angry and sad in the stands of the King Saud University stadium, leaked statements to the media about the betrayal of the victory he loved, how terrible the cafe is, and how superior the gym equipment is?

Cristiano Ronaldo receives a warm welcome from Al-Nasr fans – video…

However, there is a lot of sadness here too, and indeed an important cautionary tale. The truth is simple. Ronaldo marvel was a good soccer player. Then it ceased to be. The hype, the acrimony and the huge waves of wasted money have arisen from the gap between this hard sporting fact and the unspent power of Ronaldo’s industrial complex, his refusal to die, to stop earning and to accept this reality.

It was uncomfortable to watch this happen, to see Ronaldo the footballer — still on the outside the same plasticized rubber meat cake, the same snake-encrusted wedding-cake figurine getting drained — exhausted by age and death. There is also sadness in seeing such an influential figure become an avatar for human greed. It’s easy to misunderstand Ronaldo’s popularity, dismissing it as a marketing, including cult, celebrity-fad.

But Ronaldo is also an encouraging story. This is a poor kid from a tough background who conquered the world through talent and hard work, who embodies sports as a dream factory. Ronaldo determined his own destiny, fixing his body, fixing his teeth, and mending his broken start in life. If you’re out there, and if the world seems closed in on you, here’s an inspiring story.

Calling Ronaldo the highest-paid footballer in the world is like calling Tom Cruise the highest-paid fighter pilot

And now Ronaldo is telling us something equally important. One of the biggest battles in Big Sport right now is the divide between the real and the fake. From staging the Qatar World Cup to Premier League projects, to the celebrity-worshipping of players, it’s a key question: is this thing really real? Can we trust the show in front of us?

Ronaldo has become a very useful divine tool for this strain of unrealism. In that light, his expulsion from the Premier League should be seen as a triumph, a good news story, and confirmation that this thing is still sport, that it still has hard edges.

By the same token, there has never been a more heartwarming moment at Qatar 2022 than Fernando Santos, 68, who is way-and-feel-dressed like a 1970s New York detective with a fold-out bed in the wall, and has the guts. To drop Ronaldo and replace him with a 21-year-old. This drop said the same thing: No matter what you bump into this thing, it remains, for the time being, basically honest.

What else do we have? The return to United was clearly not a real one, but instead a celebrity wax installation, designed to give the illusion of life. Erik ten Hag has already done English football, and indeed the wider public discourse, a huge favor by forcing Ronaldo out, by insisting that there is still a line between the real and the fake.

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Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertisements, and content funded by third parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Cristiano Ronaldo has been dropped in favor of 21-year-old Goncalo Ramos for the World Cup. Photo: Buda Mendez/Getty Images

It is clear that the transition to victory is also not real. L’Equipe described Ronaldo’s contract this week as an “economic aberration”, but that only applies if we accept that it is about football. Calling Ronaldo the highest paid footballer in the world is like calling Tom Cruise the highest paid fighter pilot. There is a real problem here. Ronaldo no longer plays sports. He is an actor, a propaganda speaker, a tool of power.

And again, there’s a kind of sadness in this, questions about what exactly Ronaldo’s sporting legacy will look like. The best Ronaldo, in my opinion, was the 2008 edition, which accumulated a record number of Ballon d’Or points when he was still a very expressive and entertaining team player.

His progression from that point on has been a return to a more literal version of what winning means, mobile goal hammer, moments provider, elite football as TikTok reel.

Six hundred goals. Five hundred hat-tricks. million goals. First man to score against every team in every league at the same time. Ronaldo’s career could begin to look like a kind of football masturbation, and sport as endless self-glorification. What does winning actually mean to him? That Ronaldo is cool and famous and has defined his muscles? Does it tell us anything about theory, collectivism, team play, or shared virtues?

No one has embodied sporting individualism to such a degree, or reduced football so deeply to a celebrity obsession. Saudia is the latest step in this direction, towards a product that is rootless and timeless, based instead on consumer imagery, branding, and design.

Ronaldo at least tells us this, putting himself entirely on one side of that fight. In this sense, it has come to perfectly embody the era, and point more vividly to its fabric-free, imaginary future. This, at least, seems real.

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