Real Madrid Ronaldo Bid Is Pure Fantasy

The head­line of this arti­cle is very much mis­lead­ing. Real Madrid’s £80m bid for Man­ches­ter United star Cris­tiano Ronaldo is cer­tainly very real. Just as with their recent £56 mil­lion sign­ing of AC Milan’s Brazil­ian play­maker Kaka, the Madrid giants are very much pre­pared to the huge sum of money for the Por­tuguese winger.

How­ever, it must be ques­tioned what real­ity Madrid and more specif­i­cally club pres­i­dent Flo­rentino Perez is liv­ing in. The world is in the midst of a global reces­sion and cor­po­ra­tions as large as Lloyds Bank­ing Group are lay­ing off thou­sands (if not tens of thou­sands) of staff, who are unable to find alter­nate employ­ment. Despite this, the foot­ball world has gone mad, with the world trans­fer record about to be shat­tered for the sec­ond time in as many weeks.

That Perez is the man at the cen­tre of it comes as no sur­prise. It was under his watch that the Galac­ti­cos era took place and the pre­vi­ous trans­fer record was bro­ken when Madrid signed Zine­dine Zidane from Juven­tus. Zidane was just one of many super­stars to appear in a Real Madrid shirt along­side David Beck­ham, Luis Figo, Roberto Car­los and the orig­i­nal (and I would argue bet­ter) Ronaldo.

Perez returned to the club last month in a blaze of glory, promis­ing to reform the Galac­ti­cos (per­haps for­get­ting the pre­cious few tro­phies won under his orig­i­nal spell at the club). Kaka has signed, Ronaldo is on his way with the promise of many more, with Valencia’s David Villa strongly rumoured to be the next to signup at the Bernabeu.

As for Man­ches­ter United, they must be laugh­ing all the way to the bank at the ridicu­lously high fee for an albeit immensely tal­ented player. The facts are Ronaldo failed to recap­ture his blis­ter­ing form from the 2007-08 sea­son and for £80m, United will cer­tainly be able to reshape their team which has shown recently it needs fresh­ened up, despite recap­tur­ing their Pre­mier­ship trophy.

The cold hard facts are United were out­played by Barcelona in the final of the UEFA Cham­pi­ons League and with Car­los Tevez also linked with a move to Man­ches­ter City, it could be a very dif­fer­ent United lineup next sea­son. Iron­i­cally one man who could be appear­ing in a Man United shirt next sea­son could be Madrid’s very own Klaas-Jan Hunte­laar, who has failed to set­tle in Spain.

Back to Madrid though and once again, they seem to have for­got­ten about their defence. It’s all well and good hav­ing stars like Ronaldo and Kaka going for­ward but the real­ity is, if you can’t defend set pieces, you aren’t going to win tro­phies. Madrid’s already vul­ner­a­ble defense has been fur­ther weak­ened by the depar­ture of Fabio Can­navaro to for­mer club Juventus.

It remains to be seen how the Galac­ti­cos will fair — one thing that is cer­tain how­ever is that with Perez in charge, it won’t be low profile.

Writ­ten by Danny Wat­son, a pro­fes­sional sports writer who blogs about foot­ball news.