Cristiano Ronaldo is playing poker with Manchester United for a second summer running.
Last year, he and his agent, Jorge Mendes, did it by dangling Manchester City’s interest in front of them. And this time Ronaldo has clearly caught a whiff of the idea that Erik ten Hag fancies moving him on, so they’ve drummed up a suggestion that other teams want him to try to get United to panic again and tie him down.
Well, my message to Ten Hag and Co is clear: show some cojones and biff him off. Because, for one thing, can you imagine Liverpool, City, Barcelona or Real Madrid being held to ransom and thinking, ‘Oh, hang on, if another big club wants him, maybe we’d better keep him’. Of course you can’t.
And, for another, if United, with their shiny new head coach, are still having to hang their hopes on a 37-year-old Ronaldo for next season then they are in an even worse position than I thought they were. If United are serious about having a shake-up they need to let him go and let him go now, even on a free if they have to.
He has had tear-ups with other senior players and regularly shown his stroppy side, which is something United don’t need right now. They are a young, vibrant team and if getting rid of Ronaldo means they are going to miss out on 20 goals next season but get a better dressing room and team spirit then so be it.
I know supporters will be gutted because he ‘loves the club’, this notion that players have the same emotional tie as fans do is rubbish. If Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain or Bayern Munich had offered Ronaldo a penny more than he was offered by United last summer, he’d have gone there in a flash.
Because, while I’m sure he loves United and has an attachment to them, when all’s said and done it is show business, not show friends.
Now the suggestion is he’ll look for a team which offers him Champions League football next season and I’d suggest he’ll end up at a Napoli or somewhere like that. The template is already there with Jorge Mendes’s star managerial client, Jose Mourinho. Mendes gets his men into clubs with cache and money even if they aren’t the biggest in their country.
So you just have to look across Europe at the tier-two clubs which have nicked into the Champions League this season and which get 50,000-odd and up through the gates each week and pick one of those as his destination. Younger managers won’t want the hassle of Ronaldo effectively running their dressing room because the negatives outweigh the positives.
But if you’re on the way up and you need to tell your supporters you are serious about getting into the Champions League and staying there then Ronaldo, just like Mourinho, is your man. Ronaldo will go down as club legend at United, he has scored big goals, so his legacy is untainted on the pitch. He will leave as a legend but even at this stage of his career he is a luxury United cannot afford.
