Rudi Garcia, the manager of Al-Nassr, has stated that Cristiano Ronaldo will not finish his career playing football with the club.
After making headlines earlier this month by finalizing a transfer to a club in Saudi Arabia, the great player from Portugal has not had everything go according to plan since making the move. Close rivals Al-Ittihad were able to knock Garcia’s league leaders out of the Saudi Super Cup on Thursday, with Ronaldo, the team’s captain, failing to score for the second consecutive game after going goalless in his first appearance last Sunday.
Garcia did not hold back when it came to criticizing his new talisman for blowing a golden opportunity while the game was in progress. “One of the things that affected the course of the match was Cristiano’s lost opportunity in the first half,” the manager analyzed after the game.
The manager did not mince words when he expressed his concerns on the way in which the Portuguese superstar had been integrated into the club. Garcia was critical of his colleagues for passing to him an excessive amount, and he also claimed that Ronaldo’s posture was too similar to that of teammate Anderson Talisca.
As a result of the fact that no European team was willing to grant Ronaldo a contract during the summer of 2017, he made the decision to relocate to a club in Saudi Arabia. The player’s requests for a higher wage, along with his declining performance on the field and his approaching age, meant that his alternatives would be severely restricted.
In the explosive interview that Ronaldo gave to Piers Morgan in November, which resulted in the amicable breakup of his relationship with Manchester United, Ronaldo confidently agreed that his decision to reject a move to the Middle East demonstrated how eager he was to still compete at the top level in Europe. This statement came during Ronaldo’s bombshell interview with Piers Morgan, which ended his relationship with Manchester United by mutual consent.
When Ronaldo moved to the Middle East, he said that his career playing club football in Europe is ‘finished’ and added, “I am lucky that I have won everything I set out to earn in European football.” Ronaldo’s transfer to the Middle East came shortly after he said the following: It seems like the proper time to talk about the things I learned while traveling in Asia.
Now, Garcia, the manager of Al-Nassr, has stated that “he is one of the top players in the world.” He will not complete his career in Al-Nassr; instead, he will move back to Europe. This runs counter to previous rumors, some of which came from ESPN and were published earlier this month. Those reports said that Ronaldo’s intention was to retire at the club, as the player himself had indicated.
The decision that Ronaldo made to finish his career in Saudi Arabia has been met with criticism from several sources. After Messi’s victory in the World Cup, his former teammate at Liverpool, Jamie Carragher, made a disparaging comparison between him and the Argentine forward.