Ronaldo’s Not Worth United’s Principled Stance

I don’t want to write another tiresome article on Ronaldo. But the lad seems to have a knack of staying in the news.

I’ll keep it short to save you the trouble. For the others, I’d recommend poring over the comments from yesterday, if you want to see people displaying hurt sentiments.

I personally stopped caring many weeks ago, and if you are a regular here, you’d know it. Yesterday following Sepp Blatter’s comments regarding slavery, Ronaldo funnily (to put it mildly) agreed with what he had to say. I actually thought when I read the comments on skysports.com that it may have been taken out of context, but having seen the video there wasn’t really any different way of looking at it.

Ronaldo’s comments may not have earned him favours with the United management or players. Perhaps the only players who may agree with Ronaldo’s comments right now might be the likes of Hleb and Adebayor.

Even if you take your red spectacles off for a moment, Blatter’s comments come across as a case of extremely poor choice of words. The fact that Blatter railed against the eventual ruling in favour of Webster (which resulted in greater player power) speaks of the contradictions that fill the FIFA president’s head. And now Ronaldo has give further credence to his remarks.

Football economics function slightly different to that of regular people, in that there are contracts that exist. Whilst players have more power to get out of their contracts now, they still are legal documents that a club would expect a player to adhere to. Anyway, this post was not to debate that.

What I want to know is, if one does a cost benefit analysis of Ronaldo staying for a season at United, is he worth all the pain?

Let’s consider the latest bit of injury news to come out of Old Trafford: the player says that he expects to be out for three months, something the club has reported on its website. Note: the club has not moved to release a statement denying he’d be out for that long a time [in fact it’s not possible to put an accurate date but let’s give or take two weeks], unlike what they’d done with regard to taking advice on his operation previously.

So after all the talk about his injury, his statements (or the lack of them), is there any point in keeping him? Real would still be more than happy buying him now, although they’d try to push his price down with his injury. Three months from now would mean he’d be back only by October with a bulk of our toughest fixtures already over. We’d be kidding ourselves if we said next season was going to be a breeze. But one would question the wisdom of keeping him any longer, and justifiably.

Oh well, I still think he will stay at OT. But that belief, which was strong a few weeks ago, is considerably weakened with the latest developments.

PS: I am not good at expressing emotions well, but women blogging about football give an emotional angle to things. So here’s Jak with an account of her feelings for Ronaldo. She’s done a better job than me, for sure. In general, she runs a good blog and gives you a female perspective to footy and United in particular.

PPS: I also hopefully started a weekly column for Soccerlens, (hopefully I can stick to the one column a week thing) where I take my blinkered red-tinted lenses off (or sometimes I keep them on) as I discuss general football matters. Today’s piece is on how to promote soccer in the United States. Do read it and feel free to disagree.