The Cristiano Ronaldo paradox

Cristiano Ronaldo. The name is often introduction enough.

What tends to follow is a list of individual achievements and records. Numbers of high volume, high quality and high longevity. And on it goes.

Against Norwich on Saturday, 37-year-old Ronaldo scored a hat-trick to snatch a much-needed win for Manchester United and revive their faint hopes of Champions League qualification.

Ronaldo’s efforts earned him his 97th, 98th and 99th goals in the Premier League. This trio of goals was the 60th hat-trick of his professional career, and his 50th at club level. His final goal on Saturday was a free kick: the 58th he has scored and his 12th in the Premier League. He is now joint-third for direct free-kick goals in the Premier League, behind only James Ward-Prowse and David Beckham.

Ronaldo’s three goals against Norwich mean that he has, once again, scored at least 20 goals in all competitions in a season, something he has done in each of his previous 16 seasons at club level — a run starting in 2006-07 during his first stint at United. To give that statistic some added context, following the victory over Norwich, Ronaldo handed his hat-trick match-ball over to 17-year-old forward Alejandro Garnacho as a gift. The academy prospect, named on the first-team bench for the first time, was only two years old when Ronaldo first finished a season with 20 goals.

Ronaldo has somehow become more than a football player. He is a sporting institution. A social media behemoth. A one-person marketing team. A reality-warping entity — and possibly, one of Manchester United’s biggest issues for next season.

“A lot of debate this season about whether signing Ronaldo was right. Where would we be if we hadn’t?” were the thoughts of one Athletic subscriber following United’s win, and it is a question that has rumbled throughout the season.

It’s an argument that bears some logic. Ronaldo’s hat-trick against Norwich takes him to 15 goals in the Premier League for this season, behind only Mohamed Salah and Son Heung-min. The second-highest goalscorer for United in all competitions is Bruno Fernandes, with nine. There are also valuable goals against Villarreal and Atalanta in the Champions League that helped United qualify from the group stages.

Ronaldo is mobbed by Manchester United team-mates after completing his hat-trick against Norwich (Photo: Tom Purslow/Manchester United via Getty Images)

If one looks at the raw, surface-level numbers of Ronaldo’s individual success, and subtracts them from the collective malaise, then it can be hard to argue that this United team of varying technical ability and physical application would be in a better position without one of football’s most hard-working and single-minded talents.

Talk to one of his many fans about Ronaldo’s virtues and you will get a description not of a football player but more of a concept. Ronaldo is “inevitable” to his devotees. There were Manchester United club officials among those aficionados. Upon signing him for the second time, United admitted they did not expect Juventus to sell the striker and that this season’s homecoming was not part of their plans for the summer 2021 window. United brought him back because Ronaldo is Ronaldo, a thing that defies football logic.

The naysayers raised their eyebrows at the deal and said, “You can’t play football with Ronaldo up front and win,” and so the response became: “YOU can’t. Ronaldo can.”

“I told my players at half-time if you score me 20 goals and give me 15 assists, you wouldn’t need to press as much,” said Dean Smith following the game. But the Norwich manager also tried to bust some of the Ronaldo mystique: “He’s the difference but we’ve handed him the first goal on a plate. The second one as well. He gets a run on his marker. We know he’s got a good leap but if he doesn’t get a run at his marker, he doesn’t score and I think (goalkeeper) Tim Krul should save the last one, as well. Yes, he’s one of the best players in the world, we all know that, and you can’t give him any chances.”

“Where would Manchester United be this season without Cristiano Ronaldo and his goals?” is a misnomer of a question because:

1. It overlooks *how* Ronaldo gets his goals, believing him to be merely an additive to United’s attack instead of a player who takes the lion’s share of the team goalscoring responsibility. He was always likely to score 20 goals for United this season as a result of shooting on goal at a high volume. If a football club in 2022 needs a goalscorer, you can do a lot worse than Ronaldo (in seven of the nine games he has scored in, he has been the match-winner) but that does not mean that he is someone best-suited to the rest of a United team unsure of whether to play in a counter-attacking style, a high-pressing style, or realising their ultimate future ambition of playing possession-based football.

2. It fails to consider the impact of Ronaldo’s particular playing style on attacking team-mates. Ronaldo’s continued presence in United’s starting line-up is a rare and much-needed consistent point in an attack depleted by injuries to Edinson Cavani, the loss of form of Marcus Rashford, and the departure of Anthony Martial and others. However, Ronaldo’s tendency to roam around the field hunting with the ball and his limited skills in build-up play mean he is taking the ball from other creators, such as Paul Pogba and Fernandes, but not giving back chances that others may finish. Hypothetically removing Ronaldo from the 2021-22 version of United does not merely take away his goals but dramatically changes the attacking trajectories of all other attacking players around him. Ten of Ronaldo’s 15 Premier League goals have come in five fixtures: there needs to be a more balanced share of the goals. As the defeat against Everton showed, Ronaldo cannot do everything.

3. It overlooks the much bigger, more pertinent question: why were United able to shortcut their usual processes to make a speedy purchase of Ronaldo when there were other more glaring issues in United’s squad before the summer 2021 window closed?

It is not Ronaldo’s fault that Pogba lost his runner to begin Norwich’s first goal on Saturday. The presence of Ronaldo is not responsible for Diogo Dalot being nutmegged, nor was he the reason that Alex Telles drifted too far centrally, allowing Kieran Dowell a free header at the back post just before half-time. It was not Ronaldo that made Telles unable to read Victor Lindelof’s signal to track back in the 52nd minute, leaving Teemu Pukki with wide amounts of space to run into to get Norwich’s second goal.

Ronaldo gesticulates as Manchester United don’t have things all their own way against Norwich (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)

But the “problem” of Ronaldo only partially has to do with his on-field playing style. The “problem” of Ronaldo is what he is a symptom of: a club of expensive individually-purchased parts with little regard for collective fit. It is not Ronaldo’s fault that United did not sign a defensive midfielder last summer — but to watch Pogba toil for the better part of 55 minutes as the defensive midfield pivot (a position in which he has often struggled and dislikes) made one wonder where would United be in the league table if Rio Ferdinand, Sir Alex Ferguson and others had managed to convince United’s club hierarchy to move definitively and secure someone who could have played that role instead.

After Ronaldo scored against Villarreal in November, Thierry Henry, speaking as a pundit on CBS Sports, said, “The problem is when your poison is your medicine, you will struggle.

“You watch the game (against Villarreal) and at the end, Ronaldo saves them, but when they play, they are exposed sometimes because they don’t defend as a unit. And we all know if you don’t do that, you cannot win. And, by the way, we’re talking about winning the Champions League and winning the title in England, not finishing second, third, fourth and going to the quarter-finals and semi-finals. We’re talking about winning and if you want to win, you’ve all got to run.”

United won on Saturday because of Ronaldo but they needed three goals to put away a soon-to-be-relegated Norwich. United’s victory occurred at the same time as Liverpool’s FA Cup semi-final win over Manchester City; the sort of fixture that Ronaldo would have expected to feature in during the start of the season.

The question should not be, “Where would United be without Ronaldo this season?” It should be, “If United want to be in a better place, is building a team around the needs of a striker who turns 38 midway through next season the best way to do it?”

No matter how good Ronaldo has been in the past, and how good he was against Norwich on Saturday, United will need to spend this summer building a team for the future.

(Top photo: Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

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