Pontius Pilate on Cristiano Ronaldo

Manchester United statement at 9:30am: "Manchester United have received a world-record, unconditional offer of £80million for Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid. At Cristiano’s request - who has again expressed his desire to leave - and after discussion with the player’s representatives, United have agreed to give Real Madrid permission to talk to the player. Matters are expected to be concluded by 30 June. The club will not comment until further notice.”

So it would appear that the inevitable transfer will finally be completed. Cristiano Ronaldo will finally be able to sleep easy in his bed safe in the knowledge that he has arrived at a club as facile and vein as himself. Obviously my opening statement is highly subjective and perhaps even ever so slightly harsh, but what I do think is that the motive behind this transfer and that of Kaka a few days ago must be looked at. Florentino Perez has just been re-elected the president of Real Madrid despite his rather ignominious resignation from the post in 2006 as a result of the steep decline in form of the Los Galacticos he had assembled in a five year period. Perez is a clever man, a shrewd man, but predominantly he is a businessman. He made Real Madrid the most commercial and subsequently richest club in the world during his first tenure by bringing in the best players in the world for record fees as they were seen as commodities that would hugely increase the revenue of the club (or to use the repulsive and yet apt American term: ‘Franchise’). This clearly worked off the field but on it the results for such huge investment were poor: from the day Luis Figo signed in 2000 to the resignation of Perez in 2006 Real Madrid won the Champions League once in 2002 and two La Liga titles in 2001 and 2003. This is not a record to be scoffed at under normal circumstances but the huge investment in players resulted in it being something of a disastrous failure.

In short the Los Golacticos period failed because it was pre-occupied with selling replica shirts in Shanghai, Lagos and Toronto. Anyone who followed the slow and painful decline of the ‘greatest club team ever assembled’ could see that the decisions were being made by the board and the egotistical players; when Zidane thought he wasn’t getting enough of the ball went straight to Perez as he was the man who could make things happen and assure him that the icon would not be affected by this silly game of football.

So my delusional blabbing brings me to a point, Perez is back at Real and as you can all see from the activities of the past week he has a cunning plan very similar one he hatched a decade ago to great commercial success. When questioned two weeks ago about the huge fees paid for players during his first term as President Perez stated quite proudly that the acquisition of Zidane was an extremely profitable one for the club. The question I really ask myself is that does this kind of tactic really benefit the Real Madrid supporters or indeed football itself? Every cockney red knows that we are in no place to judge teams about using financial muscle to gain success on the field and perhaps prevent the smaller teams from progressing, however surely a hotchpotch team of superstars that are brought together for predominantly financial (although maybe for a laugh sporting) success is a truly damaging thing for the game.

I think Bill Hicks really got it right when he said:

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK?

Written by Pontius Pilate