There are a bunch of amazing things about Cristiano Ronaldo's debut for Manchester United. First off: that it happened 19 years ago. These highlights are old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes, invest in some AMC stock and slice up a pound of processed meat at the grocery store.
Then there's how stiff everyone else looks. Compared to Ronaldo, gliding up and down the field at any angle he wants, Diego Forlan looks like he's playing in a full-body cast. At one point, Ruud van Nistelrooy, faced with a ball suddenly moving at a pace and trajectory he has never seen before, kind of just closes his eyes and hopes for the best, ultimately smacking his header directly into the ground. After Ronaldo beats three defenders in an effort to secure a lane for a simple back pass, Wes Brown slices a clearance into the stands with his big toe.
Soccer would change drastically over the next two decades, with Ronaldo at the vanguard of its evolution toward a faster-paced game that demanded, at the highest level, a combination of elite athleticism and technical ability. It used to be that you could get by with one or the other -- not anymore. Watching those highlights today, it looks like someone from 2014 first built a time machine and then used it to go back to 2003 because he was fed up with hearing all the ex-United players in the English media talking about how great their teams were.
But that's not No. 1 on my personal scale of amazement. No, the most amazing thing about Ronaldo's debut is that he didn't attempt a single shot.
Per the site FBref, he has since put 1,440 shots on target. We don't have total shots data going back that far, but Stats Perform has it for all of Europe's five biggest league leagues starting in 2010. Since then, Ronaldo has attempted 2,429 shots; Lionel Messi (2,023) is the only other player above 2,000; Robert Lewandowski (1,530) is the only other one above 1,500.
While he started off as the unstoppable, omni-directional winger who'd beat his man, then another man, and then another man before bending a dipping cross onto a striker's head, Ronaldo's game steadily evolved toward one point: the shot. He shaved off his inefficiencies, stopped dropping deep into his own third, got rid of some of the step-overs, forgot about beating full-backs to the end line and devoted his entire game toward getting as many shots as humanly possible because that led to getting as many goals as humanly possible. And getting as many goals as humanly possible led to five Champions League titles and five Ballon d'Or awards.
But ultimately, it all led to where we are right now: Ronaldo scored more goals than Harry Kane last season, and nobody seems to want him.
We are in the age of the super-athlete, where players persist well into their 30s and continue to dominate the games they dominated early in their 20s. There's Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, LeBron James, Sue Bird, Roger Federer and on and on. It's a real thing; the new training paradigm -- diet, recovery and mobility above all else -- has extended the careers of the best athletes in the world.
It's happening in soccer, too. The past five Ballon d'Or winners have all been 30 or older, and the likely next winner, Karim Benzema, had the best season of his life at age 34. From 1977 through 2002, none of the winners was older than 30.
Ronaldo, of course, plays his part in all that, winning two of his five awards post-30. But, well, now he's 37 -- more "almost 40" than "over 30."Amazingly, over the past decade, 27 outfield players have played more minutes after turning 35 than Ronaldo has across the Big Five leagues. Despite that, he leads them all in goals, with 59. But it's worth considering the names that come after him:
2. Fabio Quagliarella, 57
3. Luca Toni, 56
4. Antonio Di Natale, 54
5. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, 46
6. Jorge Molina, 44
7. Francesco Totti, 43
8. Aritz Aduriz, 35
9. Claudio Pizarro, 30
That's a list of once-great cult heroes who wound things down by banging in a few for a mid-table side; Totti, a one-club hero; Zlatan, a one-Zlatan Zlatan. While Ronaldo doesn't seem interested in the first role, he's out of luck with the second, and I'm not really sure he'd want the third one, either. While Zlatan is doing the two things it seems Ronaldo wants to be doing -- winning legend-making titles and playing in the Champions League -- he also already has gone to MLS and come back. Despite his outsized presence, Zlatan started just 11 games in Milan's Scudetto-winning season last year, and came off the bench in just 12 more.
Zlatan was a sub more than a starter, and if Ronaldo wants to help his teams win titles still, that's probably what he should be. He has sanded his game down to the point where he still gets a bunch of shots and still scores goals, but he doesn't really do much else. As a starter, that might've still been OK for a top team five or 10 years ago, when games simply tended to be won by whichever team took the most shots. But his own manager even suggested as much: if a team is going to be good enough to win the Champions League in 2022, its attackers need to be constantly contributing -- on both sides of the ball.
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"We know [Liverpool] are a really good team and you need to press them," Erik ten Hag said after United's recent 2-1 win over their rivals. "You have to do that out of a block and need energy, that is why we went with [Marcus] Rashford, [Jadon] Sancho, [Anthony] Elanga."
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It worked, despite United having just 29% of the possession over the 90 minutes. You'd imagine that against worse teams, the ability of the forwards to press will be even more important. And over the past 365 days, Ronaldo ranks dead last in pressures (6.61 per 90) among all forwards in the Big Five leagues.
If you strip out all the context, it's pretty easy to envision Ronaldo being an incredible "final-30-minute striker" for a top team, coming off the bench when his team is chasing a game and being able to max out his physical capacity since he's only going to be out there for half an hour. There's no doubt that the per-90 pressure number would increase significantly, and with the five-sub rule, an increased game load and a midseason World Cup, there's both more room and more need for this kind of consistent off-the-bench role than ever before.
Of course, the context is that this is Cristiano Freaking Ronaldo, a person with his own selfie app, his own museum and his own official "glass" sponsor. Per the estimates from FBref, he's the highest-paid player in the Premier League, and the fifth-highest-paid player in the world. That's not backup striker money; it's could-easily-win-the-Ballon-d'Or money. Yet Ronaldo just isn't that player anymore, though. He was No. 30 in our Premier League rankings, and his past two clubs have gotten worse, not better, after he showed up.
The other option would be to play for a mid-table team, where his lack of impact in all other phases of the game wouldn't matter as much as his ability to score 15 to 20 goals. He'd be amazing for West Ham United or Wolverhampton Wanderers; there's also no way he wants to ever play for West Ham or Wolves. He wants to leave Old Trafford because he wants to play in the Champions League.
Manchester United don't fit his plans anymore, and it's becoming increasingly clear that he doesn't fit theirs, either. But there's just one problem with all this: what Ronaldo wants might not be what anyone else needs.