Cristiano Ronaldo and Guardiola, as the giants fall with clay feet

Nthe space of a week, football will see three of the greatest figures in its history, in drastically different scenarios. More specifically, Cristiano Ronaldo, Pep Guardiola and Lionel Messi, all of them for different reasons, being clearly simpler to avoid than others.

Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, says the Bible, imagined a statue made of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay, when a stone loosed from the mountain and slaughtered it as if it were nothing. Cristiano Ronaldo da Madeira, tells us our own eyes, imagined a unique legacy made of gold and records, which collapsed under the weight of the bazophy itself.

Cristiano Ronaldo had everything and was convinced that everything could be done. He is perhaps the most prepared player, from a physical and mental point of view, to achieve levels that no other had achieved. The perfect statue, which I thought did not need the slightest support, when it was precisely the support that was lacking.

We can speculate that, despite all its recognized defects, Jorge Mendes would have managed to avoid this collapse, since it was since the ‘divorce’ between both that everything collapsed. We can also imagine that listening to the advice of a band of illiterates did not help to understand exactly where it was.

Cristiano Ronaldo preferred to trust that gratitude was eternal, and forgot that he too had debts to pay. In particular, with Jorge Jesus, since it is necessary not to forget that, if the national selector did not now agree to guide Al Nassr, he would possibly have been ashamed of not being able to become champion in Saudi Arabia.

Pep Guardiola's story is different. A visionary, a revolutionary, whose football ideas were copied a little around the world to exhaustion. However, of innovative coaches is the full employment centre, and given the cruelty of this sport, it would invariably have ended there if it were not for the titles won.

In Barcelona, Pep Guardiola erected 14 trophies, between 2008 and 2012, which is how he says, at the height of the period when the then vice president of the Technical Committee of Arbiters of the Real Spanish Football Federation, José María Enríquez Negreira, would be an employee of the club itself, according to the evidence sent by Real Madrid to UEFA.

In Manchester City, there were 20 cups reached between 2016 and 2026, i.e. under successive injections of capital illegally carried out by the United Arab Emirates, which allowed it to spend money on reinforcements that no one else had access to, according to the conclusions reached by an Independent Premier League Commission.

This leaves the hegemony of German football that it maintained during the period in which it commanded Bayern Munich between 2013 and 2016, when the difference for competition was so much that, it will not be daring to say, it would be complicated to fail internally (as opposed to what happened at international level).

Lionel Messi, a human being with his flaws (no one forgets the way he ‘validated’ Donald Trump in the White House in March), but whose genius, contrary to what happens to Cristiano Ronaldo and Pep Guardiola, lies, above all, in the way he knew how to accept his own ‘handicaps’ to claim the throne of football.

At the age of 39, he knows that the body no longer accompanies the brain as before, so he chose to abandon the Argentine national team before football left him. In the early hours of Tuesday to Wednesday, it will be a pity that the sport-king will watch the farewell of a giant who turned clay into gold... from head to toe.