‘Real Madrid will receive a €180m offer for Cristiano Ronaldo’. That’s what A Bola’s front page is saying today, even though the origin of this bid is still unknown.
That’s already a pretty strange start. But the story becomes even vaguer, with lots of assumptions and very few developments after this initial information. However, they do manage to drag Manchester United in. The article says Madrid expect a bid, and it could come from England, France, or China.
The potential offer of €180m isn’t explained. Will all these clubs make the same bid? Why exactly €180m? Is Jorge Mendes offering him around for this amount? Nothing about it is said.
A Bola make things worse by recalling that the club turned down a €200m offer in the past, and this time, ‘it’s very difficult to imagine the outcome of such negotiation’. Which, in other words, means ‘we have no idea of what will happen’.
Manchester United, for obvious reasons, are named in the article. The newspaper claims Ronaldo was never forgotten by Old Trafford directors there and that could lead the club to try to sign him again. Once again: no new information here, just big assumptions.
Ronaldo himself often claims he’s keen on finishing his career at Real Madrid, and that’s also something brought up in the story, even though ‘it’s still not possible to know’ how he’d react if this hypothetical offer arrived.
The last strange part of the story is that it’s signed off by someone named Ricardo Quaresma. Checking it wasn’t Ronaldo’s friend, and international teammate, Sport Witness spoke to people from the newspaper and found out there’s an editor with the name, who’s frequently the target of jokes about it.
Despite these A Bola claims now being all over the English media, there’s nothing meaty here to launch yet another summer of Cristiano Ronaldo to Manchester United.
