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LONDON: Last month, Real Madrid won a third consecutive Champions League Final. By the end of August, they could have divested themselves of both the coach who oversaw such unprecedented success and the footballer at the helm of it.
Zinedine Zidane has already gone, resigning before he was dismissed. As matters stand, Cristiano Ronaldo is on his way out, infuriated with Florentino Perez for reneging on a promise to make his pay match his status as the world’s best footballer.
“It was very beautiful to be at Real Madrid,” said Ronaldo minutes after becoming the only player to win five Champions League Finals. Subsequent discussions with Madrid’s president have not resolved the conflict. The Portuguese is still talking about his club in the past tense.
Ronaldo’s position is straightforward. He has won four of the past five Ballons d’Or. Across his nine seasons at the Santiago Bernabeu he has returned well over a goal per game, resetting a host of club, national and continental records while winning 11 major trophies. In the past three Champions League campaigns alone he has delivered 43 goals in 38 appearances.
By statistical measure and FIFA vote his contribution to the game has surpassed that of every peer for multiple years. Yet not only Lionel Messi, but also Neymar, are paid significantly more than him.
In the first half of 2017, Perez promised to improve Ronaldo’s contract, at that point worth a basic €48 million ($56 million) per year, before tax. By the time Madrid’s offer was presented to the forward, Neymar’s salary was higher at Paris Saint-Germain, while Messi’s game of brinkmanship with Barcelona had secured a deal worth over €50 million a year after-tax once the Argentine’s €100 million signing bonus was factored in.
Perez refused to match those terms, instead making an offer to Ronaldo structured around performance-related payments. For a footballer who has guaranteed elite performance for a decade the proposed contract was — and is — considered an insult. As is the message being sent to Spanish media that a 33-year-old Ronaldo should not expect anything better.
A further thorn is one that also irritated Zidane: the president’s perpetual courtship of Neymar. When Ronaldo received his fifth Ballon d’Or last December, Perez announced that “being in Madrid would make it easier” for the Brazilian to wrest football’s premier individual award from him. Neymar and father spent the remainder of the season agitating for that transfer to happen.
A broken promise, an offer to renew on conditional terms where “the difference to Neymar and Messi is too big”, and a president obsessed with signing a 26-year-old troublemaker yet to deliver a single goal-per-game season. Those close to Ronaldo think the outcome of this constellation of problems will be a departure from Madrid.
A return to Manchester United, they say, is not easy. Jose Mourinho’s squad is well provided for in Ronaldo’s position and the manager’s focus in on strengthening elsewhere. PSG is the more realistic transfer.
The Qatar-owned club has long coveted Ronaldo and is working on a strategy to secure the move this summer. Financial wherewithal is not an issue for a state-funded entity that committed to  the two highest transfer fees in history last summer. What PSG have to find is a way of structuring the transaction so that it passes UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations.
One element is to ensure that Madrid’s price for Ronaldo reflects their own reluctance to meet the player’s salary expectations. Another involves selling the likes of Julian Draxler, Odsonne Edouard, Angel Di Maria and Goncalo Guedes to raise revenue and create room on PSG’s wage bill.
Qatar insists that including Neymar in a deal to sign Ronaldo will not happen this summer. They want both on the same PSG team, and that team to win the club’s first Champions League. If the Qataris get their way, at least one of that pair will focus all his considerable talent on making that dream reality.