Why big clubs don’t want Ronaldo

Imagine yourself, one of the best, or if not the best striker in the world, and announcing to everyone that you’re available, even at a discounted price, but nobody seems to want you.

That’s the unfamiliar territory that Cristiano Ronaldo finds himself in right now, and, to be frank, it is quite mind-boggling and confusing because with the number of honors that this man has won and records that he has shattered, set, and shattered again, why will you not want him?

And if you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know what’s so special about this man, let’s check out some of his career statistics.

Table of Content hide 1Cristiano Ronaldo Awards and Records 2Ronaldo’s Current Dillema 3Why Don’t Big Clubs Want Ronaldo? 3.1Money 3.2Style of Play 4Top Clubs That Have Rejected Ronaldo 4.1Bayern Munich 4.2Chelsea 4.3Paris Saint-Germain 4.4Atletico Madrid 4.5Real Madrid 5Ronaldo wants elite football, but does elite football want him?

Cristiano Ronaldo Awards and Records

Cristiano Ronaldo has, over the course of his career, won five Ballon d’Or awards, second only to Lionel Messi’s seven and the most for a European player. He also holds the record for most goals and assists in the UEFA Champions League (140 and 42 respectively), the most goals scored in a UEFA Champions League season, which numbers 17, and 7 Club World Cup goals.

At the international level, he’s also the highest goalscorer in the UEFA European Championship with 14 goals, 31 at its qualification stage, most appearances in a European national team with 180, and most international goals at 115. Ronaldo has scored a record 815 senior career goals for club and country, and is also one of the few recorded players to have marked over 1,100 professional career appearances.

Apart from all these, he’s also the fastest player to reach 100 goals for a single club, hitting this mark with just 105 games at Real Madrid, and with at least 40 goals a season between 2010 and 2016, Ronaldo is Los Blancos’ all-time top scorer with 450 goals in 438 games. In just nine seasons.

And just when you think that’s all, you learn that he’s also a brand; CR7 is worth millions of Euros and is Portugal’s most valuable brand, worth as much as their port. He is the most followed sportsperson on Instagram, with over 454 million followers, as well as a lifetime brand ambassador of Nike. He moved two bottles of Coca-Cola out of the way at a press conference last year, and the company’s shares dropped by $4 billion. Talk about influence.

And that’s not all; there is also the man’s determination and willingness to step out of his comfort zone and challenge himself, as he did in 2018 when he left the Bernabeu for Juventus, where he went on to show the Italians Portuguese magic for three seasons. Then he left, and in a fit of passion over reason, he chose to return to Manchester United.

ALSO READ: Importance of transfer window in football; dates for different leagues

Ronaldo’s Current Dillema

Ronaldo’s return to Old Trafford last year might have been imagined as a dream homecoming, but it has turned out to be a nightmare for his career. For the first time in almost two decades, he struggled to reach the twenty-goal mark in a season, falling short at 24 (18 in the Premier League, 6 in the Champions League). And courtesy of United finishing 6th on the league table, cue the horror music, he’s stuck in a club doomed to play in the UEFA Europa League.

Despite last season being his worst in living memory, with critics blasting him as United’s problem, the club won none of their matches without him, and there were times when he singlehandedly carried the entire team with two hat tricks, first against Tottenham Hotspur, and a few weeks later against Norwich City.

CR7, or Ororo as he’s fondly called in Nigeria, has built a career on achieving the seemingly impossible, with an ever-present ruthless efficiency in front of goal. There is hardly a football record that Ronaldo has not shattered, and at the age of 37, he still has the fitness and work ethic of a man ten years younger. Despite controversies and arguments on both sides of the scale, there is no doubt that without him, United would be worse than they are right now.

But for the first time ever, if he stays in Manchester United, Ronaldo will not be bobbing his head to the iconic tune of the UEFA Champions League, and that does not feature in the superstar’s plan, since he wants to still win Europe’s top flight club silverware before he retires. Hence, he wants out.

And you’d have thought it would be easy, right? It’s like if the winner of a beauty pageant signed up on Tinder, shouting “I’m available!” You’d expect men, women, and maybe even a few transgender folks to flock into her dm (or whatever Tinder has) in droves, and maybe even have to fight to the death in gladiatorial matches for her hand. But no! For some reason, everyone is just viewing her profile, going hmmm and then just swiping left.

At first, it might seem like an anomaly; maybe the first batch of people just don’t have good taste. Then it becomes confusing, then worrying, then alarming, until you start feeling you need to visit a C&S Church for deliverance. Because it doesn’t look like ojú lásán anymore (ask a Yoruba person to translate for you).

United should have been the envy of clubs over when they managed to secure his services in a dramatic last-minute transfer from Juventus last year, and despite the club’s unimpressive run last season, his performance has shown that he can still deliver even under pressure. So why aren’t they rushing to snap him up?

ALSO READ: Chelsea targets snatched by Barcelona

Why Don’t Big Clubs Want Ronaldo?

As it turns out, there are two major reasons:

Money

A player like Ronaldo, as expected, doesn’t come cheap. Even with the 25% wage reduction that automatically kicked in as a result of Manchester United failing to qualify for the Champions League, and even with the option of the club letting him move for free (which is unlikely), Ronaldo’s annual salary would still hover around the $25m range.

Unfortunately, it is tight (almost) everywhere; sapa was recently knighted, and has now become Sir Pa of Brokelyn, which means most clubs would struggle to meet this demand. Still, certain top-flight clubs, while they might have lots of other problems, don’t have money as one of them, so this can be overcome. This brings us to the second and more important reason.

Style of Play

This is the major reason why most managers have been swiping left when they land on Cristiano Ronaldo’s profile. Most top clubs have, for lack of a better word, “systems”; their managers have certain styles of play and, as it is, the gegenpress style of pressing hard and winning the ball back from the front is the current trend, a system Ronaldo is not used to.

Most coaches that Ronaldo has worked with just usually let him do his own thing up front and fire at will, because that is his preferred style of play. In fact at Real Madrid, he might have been a left winger on paper, but in reality, he was a roaming striker who cut in at will, and midfielders like Isco would then drift outwards to cover his former position. That was how they got the best out of him.

What this means is that any manager that wants to sign him has to tear up any blueprint of play plans that they would have been working on all summer just to accommodate him, because, at this stage of his career, he is unlike anybody else who plays the game. StatsBomb data even indicates that Ronaldo ranks at the bottom or second to last in all possible pressing or counter-pressing metrics among Premier League forwards who played at least 1,800 minutes last season. In fact, this includes his spells at both Real Madrid and Juventus, because that’s where he has ranked in every season since 2015/16 when the data set started.

Don’t get it wrong. It’s not due to him being lazy or unfit; it’s just not what he has been asked to do. “Score goals”, they said, and he’s followed that order to the letter to become a lethal goalscoring machine who makes the hearts of keepers palpitate whenever he advances with the ball. But now asking him to reinvent himself at the age of 37? That’s like me asking my boss to chase me and try to collect a ball from me; what they call ìbàjé mixed with àrínfín in Yoruba.

Also, Cristiano Ronaldo is the type of player that you build your team around; he’s a superstar with a big presence, after all. He’s broken records for shirt sales during his transfers to Real Madrid, Juventus and Manchester United, and he is a big influence on the upcoming players. That means a manager who wants to bring him in must put him front and center, and every plan to be made must be done with him as the most determining factor. Then, in two or three years’ time when he wants to retire, they have to find a new plan.

So it’s not like managers don’t actually want him. They just happened to have weighed the pros and cons and decided that the former outweighs the latter.

ALSO READ: EPL: 6 Nigerian players to look out for in the 2022/23 season

Top Clubs That Have Rejected Ronaldo

Bayern Munich

The German champions were one of the favorites to snap up Ronaldo this summer, because a transfer just made sense. Bayern might face little to no opposition in their league, but it is the Champions League that they covet, and signing the competition’s all-time scorer would have done their chances no harm (even though the thought of CR7 playing in the farmer’s league was just… weird).

However, Julian Nagelsmann was not interested, saying in July, “As highly as I rate Cristiano Ronaldo as one of the greatest, a transfer wouldn’t be a fit with our philosophy. I love Cristiano Ronaldo and everyone knows how fantastic he is. But every club has a certain philosophy and I’m not sure if it would be the right thing for Bayern and the Bundesliga if we signed him now.”

Wow! Didn’t know that it’s not you, it’s me could also be used in football. Ouch!

Chelsea

While his United links prevent him from signing for Manchester City or Liverpool (the last one would most probably have caused riots all over England), sticking around in the Premier League with a club that recently won the Champions League would certainly appeal to Ronaldo. Hence, that leaves Chelsea as the only realistic option.

Ronaldo’s agent, Jorge Mendes, indeed recently met with Chelsea’s new owner Todd Boehly, and one of the topics of conversation was Ronaldo’s availability. But, as it turns out, the US billionaire has resisted the urge to splash out on the Portuguese superstar and what would have been a marketing bonanza for his new empire at Stamford Bridge. Ronaldo in blue would have sold a lot of shirts in the United States, a market that the club have decided to target aggressively under their new ownership after it was decided that Roman Abramovich hadn’t come close to making the most of commercial ties there.

Instead, Boehly has backed his manager Thomas Tuchel, who apparently has other areas of the squad he wants to address first.

“I would not rule out signing another striker, but it’s not our priority,’ said the Chelsea boss. “The priority right now is our defence, it’s not a secret. We lost top players and so now we need to replace them.”

Another polite way of saying non, s’il vous plait, merci, since the club signed Raheem Sterling, who, unless designations have changed, does not belong in the defence.

Paris Saint-Germain

The prospect of having Ronaldo and Messi on the same team is one that the world of football tries not to imagine, because the mere thought can lead to a stroke. And in recent times, it even seemed impossible, because Messi looked intent on growing old in Barcelona, and Ronaldo would never have been caught dead in a Barca jersey. Hence, fans have been content to restrict their dreams to FIFA and PES, virtual environments where anything is possible.

However, with Messi finally transplanting himself to Paris Saint-Germain, the dream is suddenly possible. And what’s more, the French giants are actually one of the few clubs that can make it a reality, since cash is no problem for them.

But despite the commercial implosion, explosion, and replosion that would most certainly result from partnering the two up, PSG refused to sign up on the Ronaldo race. According to Le Parisien, they are not interested, since they’ve got Kylian Mbappe, a talent 14 years his junior and currently far better, as well as Messi and Neymar.

ALSO READ: 10 football games ruined by poor refereeing decisions

Hence, they are looking to approach the transfer window from a different angle by targeting lower profiles like Nordi Mukiele and Seko Fofana after hiring Christophe Galtier as manager and Luis Campos as sporting director.

Atletico Madrid

Remember the riot I mentioned above? This would have been the Spanish version since Lord alone knows how many times Ronaldo has broken the hearts of Atletico Madrid fans. In fact, it’s quite a miracle that Diego Simeone hasn’t put a hit out on him, especially after he mocked him in 2019 by reenacting the manager’s groin-gripping celebration against Juventus in the Champions League.

But while this transfer would have been draped in controversy, it appears to have no traction, despite Mendes telling Atletico CEO Gil Marin that Ronaldo was willing to take a huge pay cut.

According to COPE, the meeting ended with the Madrid boss informing Mendes that, no, they cannot afford any sort of move for Ronaldo. Apparently, the club is in financial trouble after exceeding financial fair play targets by around €45million, and are desperately trying to lower their increasing wage bill.

Real Madrid

Yes, why not Real Madrid? This was where Ronaldo achieved immortality, after all, so, like the prodigal son, a romantic recoupling between player and club, as well as another Champions League title would make so much sense on paper. Pundits would weep with passion, and betting shops would do giveaways as Ronaldo takes on the role of mentor to sculpt the next generation of stars like Vinicius Jr and Rodrygo.

Unfortunately, Los Blancos are not interested in any sort of tearful reunion, as, according to Marca, they are looking to trim their wage bills instead and cut down on the deadwood. Carlo Ancelotti has already landed his top two targets in Antonio Rudiger and Aurelien Tchouameni, and has already closed up shop.

Ronaldo wants elite football, but does elite football want him?

So, here we have it. Ronaldo’s desire for Champions League football has left him with limited options. Sports directors across Europe all got to see the disaster at Manchester United last season as the club tried and failed to integrate the striker into their team, and are understandably reluctant to take the mantle. Because, sure, goals will come, but at what cost?

And the longer this rancor drags on, the more it would seem Ronaldo may have overplayed his hand by returning to United. A man of his considerable status and, let’s face it, ego, probably would never have imagined a world in which there was no market for a player of his reputation. Especially as he doesn’t see himself playing in the Europa League, since he even rejected a mouth-watering deal by a Saudi-Arabian club because it meant he wouldn’t be playing in the Champions League.

And since he remains contracted to United for one more year, there is a not impossible scenario in the future where Ronaldo must settle for playing outside of Europe’s top flight competition at a club he wouldn’t rather be in and under a manager who- despite public proclamations declaring the opposite – doesn’t also want him.

ALSO READ: Are foreign coaches good for Nigerian football teams?