“For me, it’s not the end of my career to come to South Africa.”
Apart from the odd geographical snafu, Cristiano Ronaldo’s unveiling as an Al Nassr player in Saudi Arabia was basically what you expected it to be.
There were blinding lights. There was headache-inducing music. There were hundreds of adults screaming “siiiiuuuuuu”.
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And at the centre of it all was a man with a rictus grin, absolutely not regretting his decisions, definitely happy with the choices he has made, delighted to be there.
Maybe it’s stupid to be snarky about Ronaldo and his new career direction. Time comes for us all in the end. He turns 38 in a few weeks and was a monumental footballer for the better part of two decades. He will always be remembered as one of the greats on the pitch. He’s only doing what countless other legends have done down the years, and taken a fat payday to cushion the blow of realising that he can’t do what he could a few years ago.
Then you remember who this guy is, and suddenly you don’t feel quite so bad about thinking this whole thing is a completely absurd spectacle, a club pandering to a man’s vanity, throwing a big party to justify to themselves the money they are spending on a name.
Because that’s what Ronaldo is, now. He’s a museum piece, a loose representation of a formerly great footballer who still thinks he belongs at the top, but has been forced to settle for this.
The 25,000 capacity Mrsool Park (which you know is going to be rebranded as the MRSIUUUU Park at some point soon) wasn’t quite full for the unveiling of their newest recruit.
The music pumps out, and at one point they play a song called Brighter Days, which feels either ironic or a little too “on the nose”. “CAN YOU FEEL IT” bellows the refrain: it’s so loud that we have no choice but to.
After he arrives in a rather low-key white car and strolls through reception in a three-piece grey suit with relatively little fanfare, he doesn’t go straight out onto the pitch to meet his adoring fans, but to a press conference room. He’s introduced as “the best player in the world”, and it feels churlish to note that for most of this season he’s not even been the best striker at the fourth-best team in England and that he was dropped by Portugal at the World Cup.
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He insists that he “had many opportunities in Europe, in Brazil, in Australia, in the U.S., even in Portugal many tried to sign me”, and there’s no real reason to disbelieve him. He mentions women’s football a few times and does a semi-decent job of convincingly saying his aims are about more than just his work on the pitch, that he has the “chance to develop not only football, but other things in this amazing country”. The adverts for “Visit Saudi” that pepper the YouTube feed give an idea of what he means by that.
Then comes the self-justification.
“In Europe, my work is done,” he says. “I won everything, played for the biggest clubs, now I have a new challenge.” The instinctive response to a statement like that is “who are you trying to convince, pal?” Until you realise that it’s him — it’s him he’s trying to convince, and you are watching a man publicly trying to talk himself into the idea that this is all great, that he’s made a good choice, that brilliant times are ahead.
We then move into what appears to be the “airing of grievances section” of proceedings, and for a second it feels like he’s going to channel George Costanza’s dad and say, “I got a lot of problems with you people, and now you’re gonna hear about it.”
But he settles for: “Many people speak, but they don’t know anything about football.
“To be honest, I really don’t worry about what the people say.”
Which, of course, is exactly the sort of thing someone who definitely, certainly, really doesn’t worry about what the people say would say.
Walks of the greatness 🐐💛 pic.twitter.com/7FzLZSchQ5
— AlNassr FC (@AlNassrFC_EN) January 3, 2023
His new coach, Rudi Garcia, glances at the packed press conference room and makes a joke about how usually “only three or four people” are there after games. He’s trying to make an amusing quip about the press only turning out for the big star, but he perhaps inadvertently reveals that Ronaldo has joined a team that, in the normal course of things, nobody cares about.
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From there, he goes to meet his new team-mates, who are gathered in the dressing room, and he goes around the group slapping hands with all of them, slapping the chest of a few, hugging the ones he recognises.
Finally it’s out onto the pitch to wave to the crowd, who scream at “The Beatles play Shea Stadium” volume. He repeats a few platitudes into the microphone and forgets the Arabic salutation he’s clearly been asked to say in advance.
There are a couple of nice bits towards the end, like the group photo with about 30 or so teenagers, or when he tours around the stands kicking souvenir footballs into the crowd and picks out a young girl, aged no more than six, to whom he hands one of them.
It’s ultimately a vacuous spectacle, but these things always are, with very little relevance or connection to actual football, so we shouldn’t expect anything else. This was the celebration of a sentient billboard, not a footballer.
The mind goes back to Ronaldo’s Real Madrid unveiling back in 2009, at the Bernabeu. Even then, with his colossal ego (a justified colossal ego, back then) already pretty well formed, there was still a sense of wonder on his face, the look of a man who couldn’t quite believe that all these people had come out to see him wave and do some keepie-uppies. He was still only 24, he had arguably moved to the biggest club in the world from the second-biggest club in the world, and everything seemed possible. On the pitch over the next decade, he exceeded even those possibilities.
Now, watching him walk into a stadium that looks more like a municipal sports centre than one of the great cathedrals of football, knowing that a couple of months ago being here was a laughable idea to him, there’s the unavoidable sense of a half-hearted ending.
Does he care? He says he doesn’t, and he can certainly dry his eyes on those massive piles of money. But you know that deep down — actually, maybe not even that deep — he absolutely does care, and that he knows this was a pageant to celebrate the beginning of the end of Cristiano Ronaldo.
(Top photo: Yasser Bakhsh/Getty Images)