n 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.
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