Erik ten Hag could not have accommodated an ageing forward whose decision to leave should aid a huge rebuilding job
. There are numerous stories of him last season disrupting drills on shape because he found them boring, insisting practice should be fun. He clashed with Harry Maguire over the captaincy. When Rangnick left him out for the Manchester derby, he returned to Portugal for treatment on his hip flexor and so, even in his absence, the story became about Ronaldo.
Any club for which he plays develops an unhealthy dependency. He is a brilliant goalscorer, so you play to his strengths so he can score goals. The problem is that ends up undermining the general pattern of play, makes it harder to create the structures that give a team control, and the side becomes predictable. Ronaldo’s goalscoring interventions protected United from an even worse campaign last season, but if he hadn’t been there they may not have needed them.
Two obvious problems remain. The first is that it’s not obvious who will sign Ronaldo now. With the possible exception of Paris Saint-Germain – who seem oddly enthused by the prospect of creating a waxwork gallery of– no European club who could afford him plays the sort of football that suits Ronaldo. Even his old club Real Madrid, never usually shy of a 30-something star, may think in the light of Karim Benzema’s form that they have moved on.
And the second is who replaces him. United, for a variety of reasons, are short of credible forwards. Ten Hag is thought to favour a move for Ajax’s 22-year-old Brazilian winger Antony. While in isolation he may prove to be a very good signing, there must be some alarm about how many Eredivisie players Ten Hag seems to want to accumulate. Bringing in a load of blokes your manager knows smacks of David Moyes at Sunderland, not a state-of-the-art scouting network.
But issues were always going to crop up when the time came for Ronaldo to leave. Awkward as they may be, they are part of the solution. The positive for Ten Hag is that this move has come from Ronaldo; it is not a decision for which the coach will be held responsible. What matters now is for the break to come as swiftly and as cleanly as possible, so he can begin to build the new age without the complication of an ageing and anachronistic icon.
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