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This isn’t how Cristiano Ronaldo’s time in Saudi Arabia was supposed to go down. After effectively forcing Manchester United to terminate his contract late in 2022, the legendary Portuguese forward was meant to have found refuge in the riches of the Pro League. Yet on a week in which his Red Devils nemesis Erik ten Hag has been sacked, it is still Ronaldo who is facing the most humiliating of realities.
Al-Nassr’s rise to global fame with CR7 by their side has not gone hand-in-hand with the success that has so often followed him throughout his career. The 39-year-old remains a marvel in his own right given the miles on his body, but his influence is waning and he has failed to find glory to the Middle East.
We’re only just exiting October, though Al-Nassr’s season is already on the brink of crisis. They trail table-topping Al-Hilal by six points ahead of their crunch clash on Friday and have been dumped out of the King’s Cup. And before you let your imagination run wild, they’re miles off the standard in the AFC Champions League as well – ‘Mr Champions League’ is looking more and more like a UEFA trademark.
Ronaldo, for his part, is still delivering goals and assists, but decline is an inescapable phenomena that spares no athlete. He’s not the player he used to be, and his team just aren’t good enough with or without him. GOAL charts where his marriage to Al-Nassr has gone wrong and where it can still unravel.
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Getty Images SportJust one pre-season trophy
When Ronaldo bit the bullet and left Europe to become the world’s best-paid footballer in December 2022, Al-Nassr were flying high and sitting pretty atop the Saudi Pro League standings. He was hardly walking into mid-table no-hopers or minnows from the division’s nether-regions. And yet they still wound up missing out on the crown by a staggering five-point margin to Al-Ittihad, who at that point had not even signed the likes of Karim Benzema or N’Golo Kante. Ronaldo was down a league title before the Saudi boom had even began.
A logical conclusion would be that Ronaldo needed a full pre-season to gel with his team-mates. The illogical outcome was Al-Nassr finishing a whopping 14 points behind 2023-24 winners Al-Hilal, who even in the absence of Neymar went unbeaten and won 31 of their 34 matches. There wasn’t, and still isn’t, too much between the two squads on paper.
Success has eluded Ronaldo in the AFC Champions League and King’s Cup, with his only piece of silverware in Al-Nassr colours coming in the summer of 2023 when they beat Al-Hilal in the pre-season Arab Club Champions Cup final on penalties – the only one of three shootouts they emerged triumphant from during that campaign. That’s a rather disappointing haul by Ronaldo’s standards, though it’s not just Al-Nassr’s record that has proven underwhelming and sometimes unstable.
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Getty Images SportConstant changes
Al-Nassr further capitalised on the growing popularity of the Saudi Pro League by adding Sadio Mane and Aymeric Laporte to their ranks the summer after Ronaldo’s arrival, while Marcelo Brozovic, Alex Telles and Otavio also came through the doors at Al-Awwal Park to strengthen the team’s core. Seko Fofana, Bento and Mohamed Simakan all followed in 2024.
Remarkably, this still hasn’t been enough to take Al-Nassr from one of Saudi Arabia’s top teams into the bracket of the top team in Saudi Arabia. There have been alterations in the dugout to try and strike the right balance too, with Rudi Garcia leaving his post towards the end of the 2022-23 season before being permanently replaced by Luis Castro. He was then succeeded by AC Milan’s Scudetto-winning coach Stefano Pioli back in September.
But no matter who’s been at the helm, Al-Nassr have encountered the same problems over and over again – they will destroy any team clearly inferior to them, but are not quite capable of grinding out results against the stronger teams in the league. The margin for error at the top is so fine, and it’s a line Al-Nassr have failed to tread successfully to this point.
Ronaldo’s numbers remain as impressive as ever – nine goals and three assists in 12 club games already this season – though there is recognition locally that he appears uncomfortable in his centre-forward role, even with the team built specifically to supply him.
Pioli, realising football in Saudi Arabia isn’t as fast-paced or tactically complex as in Europe, has attempted to get Ronaldo back into wing areas he was used to dominating earlier in his career. To the Italian’s credit, his star player has repaid him with a string of fine performances, even if results haven’t always followed, while he is still without an open-play goal in the league since August.
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AFP‘Coming to an end’
From a playing perspective, Ronaldo simply has to win the Saudi Pro League or AFC Champions League if his Al-Nassr spell is to be considered a success, but such glories feel like pipe-dreams right now. Even his exploits with the Portugal national team have brought the impending finality to his career into the spotlight.
The Selecao’s 0-0 draw away to Scotland during their October round of Nations League fixtures frustrated nobody more than Ronaldo, whose petulance in his pursuit of 1,000 career goals became the talking point coming away from Hampden Park. Just like with Al-Nassr, Portugal haven’t found a way to make playing around CR7 work.
“Cristiano Ronaldo can sense his career is coming to an end soon, which is probably why he acted the way he did against Scotland. His ego has made him the player he is today. But, I wasn’t a big fan of his antic in the Euros – he put his interests ahead of Portugal’s interests,” Didi Hamann brutally told Flashscore recently.
“Ronaldo has scored a few goals in the Nations League, but does he make them a better side? I’m not sure, they’re a massively talented team who could win these games without him. Ronaldo is at a point in his career where he needs to start prioritising the team instead of himself. I’m not sure how much of the say the manager has in team selection, which is a big issue. I’d be very surprised if Cristiano Ronaldo reaches 1000 career goals, I don’t think he can go on for that long.”
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Getty Images‘Father of the monster’
The recurring theme down the home stretch of Ronaldo’s career is that despite his brilliance, he’s no longer the best. For one of sport’s hardest workers away from the pitch and someone who prides themselves on being number one, that’s got to sting.
Even in Saudi Arabia, the place he has taken credit for the popularity of in the football world, Ronaldo has been outshone and outclassed. It’s not just his present self who has suffered an ego-battering, either.
Such home truths have already reinforced themselves a couple of times this week, starting on Tuesday when Pep Guardiola weighed in on recent Ballon d’Or controversies, labelling five-time winner Ronaldo as a “monster”, but one who is fathered by career rival Lionel Messi.
“And Messi, nobody could beat him. Just Cristiano. Cristiano was a monster, and the father of the monster is Messi,” Guardiola said. Do you really think Ronaldo would have enjoyed reading that quote?
Another trophy slips away
But Ronaldo’s Tuesday still had some new lows to stoop to. Later that evening, Al-Nassr hosted Al-Taawoun in the last 16 of the King’s Cup and were heavy favourites to advance to the quarter-finals.
It capped off a horror day for CR7. Al-Nassr could barely string passes together and were poor at the basics. They deserved to go 1-0 down late on, and Ronaldo’s comically overhit penalty that failed to level the scores deep into stoppage-time compounded his misery.
Penalties used to be Ronaldo’s bread and butter, the certainties, the bankers, the no-brainers. This latest gaffe joins his miss for Portugal against Slovenia at Euro 2024 among his recent low-lights.
The attention surrounding Ronaldo is negative again, yet he and his Al-Nassr team-mates have a shot at redemption in the coming days, as unlikely as that may seem.
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Getty Images SportTitle dreams on the line
The task of beating Al-Hilal is not a simple one though, as all Saudi Pro League comers have found over the last 18 months or so. Their last league defeat came in April 2023, they went through the entire 2023-24 season with only three losses from 59 games in all competitions and have opened the new campaign with 14 successive victories inclusive of penalty shootouts.
If Jorge Jesus’ men escape from their visit to the other side of Riyadh unscathed, or better yet as victors once more, then Al-Nassr and Ronaldo can kiss their hopes of the title goodbye. A nine-point deficit will almost certainly prove unassailable, even with three-quarters of the campaign still to play.
There is still a positive spin to this, however. If Ronaldo is the one who snaps Al-Hilal’s streak, then that may be the shot in the arm needed for Al-Nassr to turn their season around. All of a sudden, he will be in the ascendancy again and he can have one more chance at redemption. It’s just extremely tough to envisage that playing out.
Al-Nassr and Ronaldo’s season depends on victory on Friday. Without it, they may as well write the campaign off, and CR7’s Saudi adventure will go down as one reeking of unfamiliar failure.
