Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo unveiling as Saudi Arabian team Al Nassr’s new signing attracted a staggering three billion views across 40 different channels around the world.
Ronaldo, however, did not make his debut in Riyadh at Friday’s game that his new club won 2-0 as he is serving a two-match FA ban for smashing a young Everton fan’s phone while at Premier League club Manchester United.
According to FIFA’s Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP), any sanction of up to four matches that has been issued to a player by their former association must be “enforced by the new awin ssociation.”
Ronaldo signed a contract through to the summer of 2025 and, according to reports, will receive $75 million per year to make him the highest-paid footballer in history.
Barney Ronay, writing in UK’s The Guardian, articulates how what one of the Beautiful Game’s pantheon of greats, a poor kid from a tough background who conquered the world through nothing but talent and hard work, has chosen, for purely reasons, to wind down a storied sporting career: “No single figure has embodied sporting individualism to this degree, or reduced football so profoundly to an atomised celebrity obsession. Saudi is the final step in this direction, towards a product that is rootless and timeless, based instead in the consumption of images, brands, styling.”
To say this is a profoundly sad moment in footballing history is an understatement.
