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. United’s wily manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, had been considering Ronaldo for months. After the Lisbon match, he became determined to secure his signature immediately. Days later, the Portuguese winger was training with the Manchester United squad.
Even in a United team packed with talented and industrious players, Ronaldo stood out. He was fast and tricksy. He ran at defenders, and often past them. Ronaldo’s first appearance for the club was as a substitute in the second half of a match against Bolton Wanderers, in August, 2003, which United won 4–0. After the game, Ferguson melted in admiration. “It was a marvellous debut, almost unbelievable,” he said. Sam Allardyce, Bolton’s manager, was equally impressed: “Everyone holds their breath when he gets the ball.”
Ronaldo spent six years at Manchester United, during which he developed from a flashy wide player into a nonpareil attacking runner and striker. In his penultimate season at the club, Ronaldo scored forty-two times, more than double any other United player, and helped the club win both the Premier League and the Champions League. In 2008, he won the Ballon d’Or, which is awarded annually to the world’s best footballer. He was the first United player since George Best, in 1968, to win. (Ronaldo now has five Ballon d’Or trophies.)
In 2009, Ronaldo signed for more than ninety million euros with Real Madrid, with whom, in the course of nine years, he scored four hundred and fifty-one goals at more than a goal a game—an almost-unbelievable statistic in a career laden with them. While Ronaldo was at Madrid, the team won four Champions League trophies and two Spanish league titles. In 2018, Ronaldo transferred to Juventus in Turin, Italy, who bought him with the express aim of winning the Champions League. He scored more than a hundred goals in three years, and won domestic trophies in Italy, but Juventus never progressed further than the quarter finals of the Champions League.
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 a very different team from the one Ronaldo left. Ferguson retired nearly a decade ago—although he remains an influential figure, and reportedly persuaded Ronaldo to return. The club’s owners—the Glazer family, who also own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—are widely disliked by the fans, who see them as financially vampiric. (Since the Glazers’s takeover, in 2005, a club with a global fan base of millions which regularly attracts seventy-six thousand spectators to its home stadium has been saddled with debt; the owners, meanwhile, have paid themselves significant dividends.) On the field, a string of managers has struggled to inspire an expensively assembled squad. United has not topped the Premier League since 2013. But, among even the most restive Manchester United fans, the reacquisition of Ronaldo seemed, at last, like a cause for celebration. After signing his new contract, Ronaldo promised that he would bring trophies back to Old Trafford. “I am here to win,” he said. “People before speak about my age, but they should . . . know that I am different. I am different from the rest.”
That pledge was made in September. As I write, in mid-January, Manchester United sits seventh in the Premier League, twenty-one points behind the league leaders, and its bitter rival, Manchester City. In late November, after a string of abysmal results—including a 5–0 loss at home to Liverpool, and a 4–1 loss to the low-placed Watford—United sacked its manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, a beloved former player who many observers noted was entirely out of his depth in his role. Solskjaer’s replacement was Ralf Rangnick, a German with a stronger grasp of modern tactics and a professorial manner.
The team has yet to improve much under Rangnick. On January 3rd, I went to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United play Wolverhampton Wanderers with my nine-year-old son, who was wearing his brand-new Ronaldo shirt. United is our team. We stood among frustrated, and sometimes angry fans, as United lost 1–0. It was the Wolves’ first away league win against Manchester United in forty-two years, and the result was deserved. United played as if they were not on first-name terms with one another. Ronaldo was ineffectual. At the final whistle, he punted the ball high into the air in frustration. (I had to block my son’s ears quite often, as a stream of robust commentary on Manchester United’s failings flowed around us.)
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?
When Ronaldo signed his deal in September, the news was a surprise even to broadcasters. Their schedules were established before the transfer. As a result, Ronaldo’s second début, Manchester United’s home game against Newcastle United on September 11th, was not televised live in the U.K. The match became the hottest ticket in Manchester. You would either be there in person, or miss it entirely. Several newspapers reported scalped tickets being resold for twenty-five hundred pounds (around thirty-four hundred dollars).
I walked to Old Trafford for the Newcastle match under gray skies. My God, the joy the fans felt as they approached the ground! People wore their old No. 7 shirts, and sang the old song: “Viva Ronaldo! Viva Ronaldo! / Running down the wing, hear United sing / Viva Ronaldo!” Unofficial-merchandise sellers hawked scarves bearing the slogan “Ronaldo: The Last Dance.” When the players entered the stadium itself, the noise was such that even Ronaldo—who normally displays imperious confidence—looked as nervous as a child left by his parents at kindergarten for the first time. He fidgeted, and did some warm-up jumps. When he opened his mouth, the effect was dazzling. Even at a distance of fifty yards or so, the whiteness of his teeth was of a different order from the other players.
Not everyone welcomed Ronaldo back. As the match started, the Newcastle fans seated to my right taunted Ronaldo in song about the rape allegation made against him by Kathryn Mayorga, a woman he met in Las Vegas, in 2009: “Geordie boys are on a bender / Cristiano’s a sex offender.” (Ronaldo has always denied the accusation, and American prosecutors have concluded there is insufficient evidence to bring a criminal charge, but he settled out-of-court with Mayorga for three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in exchange for her silence.) Since the allegation came to light in a leak of documents in 2017, 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 “BELIEVE KATHRYN MAYORGA.”
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. In the second half, Ronaldo scored again—a streaking run followed by a dagger strike between the goalkeeper’s legs—and I honestly thought a man in his fifties standing a few yards away from me might die of happiness, or an aneurysm. Manchester United won 4–1. It was possible for some fans to imagine, in the afterglow of that win against a poor Newcastle team, that the good times would indeed return to Old Trafford.
The optimism of that early-September day has now been punctured. Ronaldo expects a great deal of himself, but how much could United fans reasonably expect from him? Ronaldo is one of the best players of all time, and his affection for United is real, but he is thirty-six years old. He remains in extraordinary shape. Wherever he plays, teammates testify to his maniacal training regime and dietary discipline. (On the many occasions he takes off his shirt in celebration, I am reminded of Gunther von Hagens’s “Body Worlds” exhibitions; Ronaldo’s skin looks not so much taut as flayed.) His top speed remains close to the fastest players in the Premier League. When he jumps for a header, he still seems to be in the air for much longer than anyone else. It’s possible that, like Tom Brady and Eliud Kipchoge, Ronaldo will redefine the limits of late-career athletes. His belief in his own exceptionalism—“I am different from the rest”—is sincere.
But one can only defy the aging process so much. Fine motor skills dull, injuries accrue, recovery between matches becomes more difficult. Expecting Ronaldo to play in, and dominate, fifty matches in a season—as he did in his pomp—is unrealistic. There has also been a change in how Ronaldo plays. Whereas once he was both a devastating runner from deep, capable of galvanizing an entire attack, now he manages his energies more judiciously. He has become a fiendish penalty-box striker, a poacher of goals, but he is more reliant on others to service his needs.
There is also the more complicated question of how much one player can, or should, change a team. Ronaldo certainly changed Real Madrid. It wasn’t just the goals Ronaldo scored, although there were so many. Ronaldo was faster and stronger than most defenders, and he developed a range of skills—a full-speed cutback known as the Ronaldo Chop is the most famous—that left opposition players trailing in his wake. He also appeared to change the way he struck the ball goalward, generating power from directly behind the ball, imparting unusual swerve and dip. On YouTube, you can watch reels of Ronaldo finishes. It’s telling, particularly in his Spanish period, how often the goalkeeper is wrong-footed before the ball flies past him.
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. Ronaldo’s unwillingness to defend, or to commit to aspects of team play that did not suit him, was a weakness that excellent teams could—and did—exploit. Wilson wrote that “he is an extraordinary footballer, by many measures one of the greatest handful the world has known. He may also be the reason this Real Madrid team never wins the Champions League.”
Wilson was dramatically wrong in his prediction about the Champions League. With Ronaldo and a group of other world-class players, Real Madrid won four Champions League trophies. The club’s success was, in large part, a result of the skill and determination of Ronaldo—even when he caused some slight imbalance or weakness in Real Madrid’s defense, he and the other attackers were good enough to counteract such flaws. The sheer volume of Ronaldo’s goals and assists, particularly in the Champions League, made Real Madrid irresistible. In the quarterfinals, semifinals, and final of the 2017 Champions League triumph alone, Ronaldo scored ten times: a freakish tally.
But the more general insight about Ronaldo has stuck. He is industrious, but he also admits to being driven by individual achievements as much as collective ones. As the documentary “Ronaldo” displayed, he has often been fixated on winning the Ballon d’Or. Comparisons with Messi, who, for all his mastery, clearly revels in collaboration, and who was at his best in a Barcelona team that was the epitome of team play, are unfavorable.
The era of the star player, epitomized by Ronaldo, may also be waning. Ronaldo returned to England at a time not only when the Premier League contains three astonishingly good teams—Manchester City, Liverpool, and Chelsea—but when the game is more about systems than it has ever been. The two best Premier League matches of the season have both been 2–2 ties. One was between Liverpool and Manchester City in October, and another was between Chelsea and Liverpool earlier this month. Both matches were characterized by an unrelentingly fast tempo, in which the two teams tested every part of their opponent’s armor to find a crack. And, although both matches included wonderful goals, and moments of individual brilliance, no single player dominated. Rory Smith, who covers soccer for the Times, discussed this new spirit of collective play with me recently. “Who is [Manchester] City’s star player?” he said. “That’s a really hard question to answer.” Currently, Manchester City is on course to win the league with matches to spare.
In contrast to City, United has many stars: Paul Pogba, Bruno Fernandes, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, David de Gea, and, of course, Ronaldo. But the team is maddeningly inconsistent, seemingly bereft of a clear idea of its optimal formation, and weak in key positions such as defensive midfield. There is a strong argument to make that if United had their priorities straight this summer, the club would have prioritized the recruitment of a really excellent defensive midfielder over an aging striker who has never enjoyed pressing opponents.
United should be performing better with the players already in the squad, but a crisis of confidence appears to have set in. Several of its best players are enduring bad periods. Rashford, who has been in past seasons a thrilling wide player and striker, often looks disconsolate. Fernandes, who is United’s most creative player and led them last season to a creditable second-place finish, has not been at his best, and was recently benched. Pogba is often a magical player for France, but has rarely flourished for United—and, in any case, he has been injured for several weeks.
Ronaldo is on course to have a good season. But he can’t fix what is wrong. No single player could. He recently gave an interview to Sky Sports in which he encouraged his teammates not to accept anything less than a top-three finish in the Premier League, which seems at the far reaches of possibility–although the team was dynamic in the second half of its 3-1 victory against Brentford on Wednesday night. He also implored fans to have patience, as the new manager needed time to communicate his ideas to the players. These did not seem the thoughts of someone who had his bags packed, but, at the same time, they were not the thoughts of an entirely happy player. Ronaldo is used to winning.
Of course, everyone who follows United longs for a time when the team is good enough to win an important trophy again. While they wait, there are consolations: a cool September evening in Manchester, a consequential Champions League match against Villarreal tied at 1–1, the thousands of fans in the noisy Stretford End baying for their team to attack, the ball dropping to Ronaldo in the penalty box with less than a minute to play, the narrow angle, the defenders unable to close him down, the characteristic short backlift, the rifle strike, the goalkeeper beaten by the power of the shot, the No. 7 shirt flung high into the air, the pandemonium.
