The Midlife Crisis of Cristiano Ronaldo
Now 39 years old, the biggest ego in football has reverted to the behaviour of a teenager as his playing career reaches a hilariously ignominious end.
It was another act of behaviour that would have led to an eight year-old being sent to their bedroom without any ice cream, but because he’s a 39 year-old man earning £173m a year, there will always be some who will blame somebody else when he starts acting up again. And perhaps the biggest reason for the way in which he’s turned out has been the way in which he’s been coddled for such a long time.
For more than twenty years, Cristiano Ronaldo has had rose petals laid at his feet wherever he’s gone and been treated as though he can do no wrong. Serious allegations were made against him, and still there was an army of acolytes more than happy to jump into the mentions of any critic on social media. Huge contract after huge contract was given to him, because football is a moral vacuum in which your ability to play the game will always trump anything your name is connected to, up to and including pesky rape allegations.
But now here he is, in the Saudi Pro League, the ultimate retirement league, playing in matches that don’t really matter against teams that almost nobody outside of Saudi Arabia has even heard of, losing his rag and getting himself sent off because he apparently seems incapable of behaving like a grown adult—some might say, especially in view of the colossal amount of money that he’s being paid, a ‘professional’—when he’s riled.
Is this really the way in which he imagined his playing career turning out, as it entered into its twilight years? We can be reasonably certain that it isn’t, but to start to be able to unpick this, you have to think away from where normal, rational people might stand.
First of all, this is quite clearly a man who will do anything for money, whether it’s playing in a league as rank as the Saudi Pro League, shilling for crypto (which might explain why he needs to keep earning £173m a year in the first place), or dancing along to a slightly remodelled version of the Baby Shark music for some reason presumably in yet another all-time low point for the concept of basic human dignity.
So to a point, we already know. It’s primarily money and ego. But his recent behaviour in Saudi Arabia has gone some distance beyond what you expect from any human being above the age of around nine years old. At the end of February, after Al-Hilal beat his team Al-Nassr 2-0 in the Riyadh Season Cup, a supporter through an Al-Hilal shirt at him, whereupon he rubbed it on his crotch and threw it back.
His latest escapades involved throwing an elbow at Saudi Arabia international Ali Al-Bulayhi twice, getting sent off, and clenching his fist as though was about to punch the referee in the back of the head. Al-Hilal are twelve points ahead of Al-Nassr at the top of the table, which I think we can all agree is quite funny.
Quite what the turbo-conservative theocrats who are ultimately funding him becoming a millionaire more than three times a week make of it all is unclear, but they’re unlikely to be happy with it all. This, it seems reasonable to surmise, is not the sort of publicity for which they’re paying an exorbitant amount of money to him.
And while the supporters of Al-Hilal seem to have taken enormous enjoyment from all this, his own club have surely taken a considerably dimmer view. Both of these matches were cup matches, and Al-Nassr are now out of both. With seven games of the season to play, Al-Hilal (who’ve only dropped four points in the league all season) already have one hand on the title.
All of this, of course, has been going on in the shadow of the other guy. As Portugal were losing 1-0 to Morocco in the quarter-finals of the 2022 World Cup finals, Argentina were cruising their way to winning the tournament. Ronaldo scored one goal in the tournament, while the other guy scored seven and finished lifting the trophy and the player of the tournament. At least the most tiresome debate of 21st century football seems to have finally been decisively concluded.
Even the retirement league decisions taken by these two players have looked very different. The other guy has been selling out stadiums across the USA and has boosted the profile of Major League Soccer in a way not really seen since Pele headed for the New York Cosmos in 1975. The Saudi Pro League’s average attendance last season was 8,345, 20% lower than the average League One attendance of 10,611.
And such are his advancing years that this ageing Instagram star’s recent tantrums could be considered something of a mid-life crisis. It certainly seems to be the case that there are a small number of former footballers who have ‘a bit of a turn’ when they hit middle-age. Consider, for example, the case of Matthew Le Tissier, a man who seems single-mindedly set on permanently tarnishing his legacy as a footballer by becoming one of the worst human beings you can imagine as the disappearance of his playing days into the rear-view mirror of his mind accelerates.
Or there’s the Horrible Little Man, who started out believing that he was George Orwell because he’d read the Wikipedia page for 1984 and wore a pair of glasses for a while. He even had a career in management for a few years before trashing that for coppers on social media with a continuous slurry of misogyny and transphobia, the result of which is that he is now completely unemployable within the professional game itself and, unless taken on by an equally far-right news channel of zero repute, will still be doing so to an increasingly diminishing audience for the foreseeable future. Well done, Horrible Little Man, you’ve really owned the libs with that career choice.
Of course, Cristiano Ronaldo will never have to shill for pennies. That’s the folly of Saudi Arabia’s decision to waste so much money on him in the first place. But with the lasting legacy of the first quarter of this century is that Messi was the greatest, and although Ronaldo remains richer than Croesus, the rest of us can at least console ourselves with the fact that he seems so unhappy. This couldn’t be happening to a more deserving person.