The birth of a machine

07/08: The Season Of Cristiano Ronaldo | Best Man Utd Goals & Highlights

The Madrid Move

From athlete to algorithm

The first billionaire footballer

The Saudi chapter: sportswashing or modernity?

The inevitable

Postscript

The only tear in the footnote of Ronaldo’s epochal tapestry will be that even he failed to return United to its former glories. When Ronaldo had returned to Manchester United from Juventus, Peter Drury had evoked a powerful imagery: “Madeira, Manchester, Madrid, Turin and Manchester again. Wreathed in red. Restored to this great gallery of the game. A walking work of art. Vintage. Beyond valuation, beyond forgery or imitation... CR7 — Reunited.”

Sadly, there was no redemption for United, which must suffer the vagaries of life, vacillating between hope and despair, even as their former hero becomes football’s first billionaire.

For Manchester United fans of a certain vintage – read mostly millennial – life is an infinite hell loop: a boom-bust cycle where the only solace is in the past nostalgia from the Ferguson era. There’s Paul Scholes discussing what it felt like to be kissed by Gary Neville after that last-minute winner against Manchester City. And of course, there’s the old tale of how the Manchester United team – with John O’Shea at right back – was tormented by a gawky-looking Portuguese lad during a friendly in Sporting Lisbon.That skinny lad would go on to become a Manchester United starter, move to Real Madrid for a record-breaking fee and win trophy after trophy, creating an era-defining rivalry with another GOAT, move to Juventus, return to Manchester United and then