bye, don't bother to write.
Joy of joys, somewhat similar to finding out Thatcher was finally leaving the British political stage, the news that Cristiano Ronaldo is to depart the Premier league to pastures new in Spain brings me nothing but happiness and glee.
Now as much as I’d like to just go off on a Ronaldo baiting fest that would unfortunately cover up the almost universal good news for all aspects of football (as I understand it anyway) that this transfer brings. That is why you will not see any bile or invective (despite it being well earned) towards him in this blither (or rather not until the last proper paragraph anyway). What I want to do is show how not only are we now free from the garbage that flows from his presence in our football but also how everyone involved in this deal is going to regret it big-time.
The reason I used the Thatcher analogy is that sometimes one individual gets a disproportionate amount of coverage, good and bad, than their abilities justify and like Thatcher the longer this goes on the more extreme is the bollox that goes with it. World’s best player, don’t make me laugh. Ronaldo was in England for 6 seasons, for the first 3 he was Nani with step overs (© Derek Robbo Robson, BBC website), shocking crosser, rubbish goalscorer, lazy backtracker, diving cheat and general “luxury” player. Then for 3 seasons he was a goal machine in a team built around his needs. The turning point, well maybe the Rooney sending off in Germany but more likely the way SAF treated him once he got back to training after that classic piece of acting. The subsequent transformation allowed the consistently second best team in the country to claim 3 first places at the expense of 3 different “top 4” challengers and install in the record books a third ManU European Cup success. It could so easy have gone the other way in 2006 with Ronaldo on his way out, it’s to my regret it didn’t.
In terms of this transfer, let’s get the fee element out of the way first. Their will be a lot of talk about it being excessive, and to some extent it is. But when Platini talks about “out of tune with the times” he shows something about him that’s worrying. This fee is perfectly in tune with the times, a club built on debt and bailouts has paid a stupid amount of money to another club built on debt so they can compete in a growing Asian market in flogging the cheaply made garments the underpaid over sweated workers in that market send over to Europe in planeloads. Perfect reflection of the divide in modern football, the big bloated clubs (add Milan, Inter, Liverpool, Chelsea, Barcelona, Bayern Munich) run by megalomaniacs engaged in an exercise of player exchange with stock market figures involved.
Better still is how both receiving and spending the cash will harm both clubs involved. Let’s start with Madrid and the sheer scale of what they are paying. This is not just the £80m on top of the £56m for Kaka, on top of what will be shelled out on Villa (£35m ish), on top of the hundreds of millions spend since 2000, its also the wages, a five year contract starting at £10m next year and climbing to £25m in the final year, its also the agents fees, image rights not to mention the cost of putting up his mum, repairing dents in the Madrid highways and the daily whores. Now talk of £500m merchandise potential needs to be tempered by some reality. Beckham may have helped Madrid garner the highest turnover in football worldwide but at no point did that turn in world class profits, half way through his stay there the club need £200m pounds worth of dodgy real estate exchange with the Madrid council to survive. This is not just a gamble, it’s a punt on the spin of a roulette wheel of gargantuan proportions and the best thing about it is, one bad tackle, one missed gear change, one not getting that rubber on fast enough and it could all go tits up, hears hoping.
Hark I hear you cry, but surely ManU are sitting pretty on this deal, well normally a club receiving a £68m profit could be considered to be doing ok, but most clubs don’t have debts of £900m and aren’t run from Chicago. Let’s deal with the already growing myth that SAF will get to spend it all. Firstly the club isn’t getting it all in one go, its £20m a year over 4 years. Secondly why would a football club which racks up £60m worth of interest payments a year, payments to cover debt incurred by the owners to buy the club then transferred to the club, decide to spend it on more players and wages. It wouldn’t, it would take most of this windfall and either pay next years instalment now or pay off a chunk of the loans, you would, I would, even the idiot that runs Leeds United would, so why wouldn’t the Glaziers? Its quite difficult for SAF to complain about how much the club will give him for transfers, he gets £30m every summer, he spends £30m every summer and remember his existing squad just won 3 PL’s and appeared in two successive CL finals. Ok so they were humiliated in one, but that hardly justifies a massive squad turnover.
The Tevez situation is most interesting and could add the cherry to this already mouth-watering cake. As we speak its touch and go, if he goes ManU lose a genuine world class player and the reality of being the second biggest club in Manchester, in financial terms, sinks in, if he stays this year’s £30m transfer kitty goes to a Brazil based Iranian agent for a player already in the squad. Sweet it is to know that on that one they just can’t win.
What about Ronaldo himself? He has agitated for this move so long one wonders if the reality will disappoint him. The omens for him are not good, Ronaldo will quickly learn how much of a role SAF played in his recent good form, he will also learn that in any team with Kaka, Raul and Casillas in it you never going to be top dog, even the general manager (some retired French bloke called Zidane) is bigger than you. He will find the defending in Spain less timid and the referee’s more difficult to con, he will have to get used to home fans from the town he plays in and with a smidgen of football knowledge, all in all the potential shock to the system could be massive. Success is a strange thing to quantify but what is clear is that any team set up with “superstars” only struggles due to the absence of “water-carriers”, as proven by Madrid themselves 2003-06.
Obviously it would have been nice to have had a Cristiano Ronaldo in England that left only good memories behind, but alas that player never existed. From the moment he arrived in this country he failed the Giggs test (basically its does your contribution to the game outweigh your idiocies, so in Ryan Giggs case his 806 ManU appearances and 148 goals are just enough to cover the fact he has never once not complained about a decision given against his club over 15 years). There were far too many dives, far too many complaints about fair tackles, far too many attempts to get others booked and sent off, not enough concern for people he injured, too many elbows and kicks out, far too many strops, sulks, whinges, far too many people making excuses for basically someone without a sporting bone in his body. Add in his personal life, the usual stories of roasts, gangbangs and alleged potentially chargeable conduct and you reach the point where when you hear he has crashed on of his many fast expensive cars into a wall your first concern is for the wall. Once someone reaches that level of public distaste (justified) its time for them to seek pastures new.
Lots of journalists will be writing of the “lasting memory” (enough to make you sick just reading the words) Ronaldo leaves behind, some will do free kicks, some his diving, some his swagger, some his pouting, for me it will be this, a not widely reported incident from the 2004 Olympic Football competition. Tw*tfeatures was 19 and in the Portugal squad for the tournament. They played Iraq, in a proper football event for the first time since the overthrow of the Baa’th dictatorship (under which players and coaches had been subjected to inhumane treatment at the hands of the head of the Iraq FA, one of Saddam’s sons). Cheating diving showpony was running down the wing in his own half towards the half way line, a smaller Iraqi opponent (on 1/100th of winker/wankers money) was chasing him down. Without even the provocation of a tug or a foul our “hero” flings out a cocked elbow straight into the mouth of the defender, resulting in broken teeth, blood and a delay of 5 minutes while he was treated. Not only did the referee fail to take any action against Ronaldo (how many times did that happen over the last 6 years, far too many), but the cunt himself just stood their complaining, never once went over to the Iraqi to check on him and carried on as if nothing had happened. That is my over-riding memory of this scourge to fair play. My only consolation is that my hope that my next over-riding memory of him will be the consequences of a Spanish defender showing him how you really swing an elbow and doing twice as much damage as I have described.
Cheating, diving, moaning, preening, greedy road hazard fucker won’t be missed.
