Ronaldo
dines with Donald for glamour portion of grotesque Saudi-funded spectacle
Barney
Ronay
A
pension-pot World Cup looms and with Trump in the White House and a crown
prince at his back, it is now a safe space
Sat 22
Nov 2025 09.00 CET
It was
hard to choose one favourite photo from football’s double-header at the White
House this week. In part this is because the pictures from Donald Trump’s state
dinner with Mohammed bin Salman and his in-house hype men Cristiano Ronaldo and
Gianni Infantino were everywhere, recycled feverishly across the internet,
dusted with their own drool-stained commentary by the wider Ronaldo-verse.
Mainly
there were just so many jaw-droppers. Perhaps you liked the one of Trump and
Ronaldo strolling the halls of power, Ronaldo dressed all in black and laughing
uproariously, like a really happy ninja. Or the one of Ronaldo and Georgina
Rodríguez standing either side of a weirdly beaming Trump at his desk, holding
up some kind of large heraldic key as though they’ve just been presented with
their own wind-up wooden sex-grandad.
Perhaps
you preferred footage of the dinner itself where even the air in the room looks
thick and smudged and strange, the kind of room where you look down and notice
the chair you’re sitting on is made out of human fingernails. There was the bit
where Trump is giving a speech about all the “unbelievable dignitaries”,
impresario-style, like he’s cutting the ribbon on a shopping mall in Boca
Raton. As you look closer it becomes clear his hair has now decisively evolved
from its previous form as a kind of flat orange hat and has gone full 1980s
newsreader bouffant, so thick with spray and chemicals it’s closer to a kind of
gauze, hair you could stick your hand in and then never get it out, like
flypaper.
Maybe
it’s the simple game of trying to work out what might have been on the menu
given Ronaldo dines off swordfish, lettuce and a gallon of mineral water,
whereas an average Trump dinner is two Filets-O-Fish covered in ketchup, 12
cans of Diet Coke and a wheelbarrow full of biscuits.
My
favourite bits are where Infantino keeps wandering into shot. There he is
again, gurning at the back of Ronaldo’s post-dinner power-selfie, looking as
ever like a vampire who does card tricks, but also seeming, at this ultimate
level of weirdness, to be showing some slight sense of impostor syndrome.
Albeit,
in Infantino’s case this is not a syndrome. He is an actual impostor, out there
pretending to be a disinterested administrator. And he is correct to feel this
way, in so much as essence of human vanity compacted into a dinner jacket and
taught to say the phrase “Today I feel like a hazelnut” can feel anything.
It is
worth being totally clear on what was happening here. This was, first of all, a
state visit and a significant refresh of US-Saudi relations. But it was also a
kind of executive benediction. First for Ronaldo, who hadn’t been photographed
in the US since the leaking in 2017 of allegations of sexual assault, which he
denies and have never been proven.
Not being
in the US has cost the Ronaldo brand millions. A final pension-pot World Cup is
looming. With Trump in the White House and MBS at his back, it seems this is
now a safe space. The quid pro quo is obvious. CR7 is huge among young men on
the internet. He’s the most winningest World Cup mascot. He’s a tall handsome
guy. This is where we are, why Trump is up at his dais saying the word
“Roonnnallldoo” in those sensuous cooing tones, like he’s whispering into the
ear of his favourite doughnut.
The
second returnee is MBS, overlord of the next World Cup-but-two. The crown
prince was on his first visit to the US since being accused by its intelligence
service of complicity in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Here he was casually
exonerated by Trump (“He knew nothing about it”) in an aside to journalists.
How do
you get hold of one of these off-the-cuff pardons? By sheer coincidence, on
Wednesday night Trump also got to announce that Saudi Arabia is investing $1tn
in the US. But whatever the lines of cause and effect, here was a man
previously accused of complicity in murder and a man previously accused of
sexual assault being welcomed back by the most indicted president in US
history. All of them talking about the power of love and peace. All of it
glossed and legitimised by the presence at the table of football.
And so
here we have it, the ultimate in grotesque sporting spectacles. For Ronaldo,
this represents a convincing nadir, confirmation of the moral emptiness of his
entire schlocky persona. But Ronaldo is also a private individual who can come
and go as he pleases. Football, Fifa, the World Cup. These things belong to us
and they really shouldn’t be in this room.
There is
a sense of outrage fatigue about all this. Infantino is doing something awful
again? No way dude. Maybe humans just prefer evil stuff on some level. It’s
more cinematic. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, the world’s first unintended rock
star, out there throwing TVs out the hotel window, the bad guy usually does
steal the show.
But it is
still necessary to ramp up the anger thrusters again, because this is a level
up. Here we have an all-time footballer, who doesn’t need more money, being
paid hundreds of millions of dollars to play in Saudi Arabia and who is now a
mascot to the travelling court.
For all
Ronaldo’s alpha-dog stylingthis is such invertebrate behaviour. I will perfect
my physical form. I will rise to become the most famous human. All the better
to polish the boots of power. None of this will dissuade any of Ronaldo’s
online supplicants. This is the point. His influence is being entirely
co-opted, the greatest one-man act of multiple regime-washing yet devised.
It also
matters because of next year’s World Cup. Infantino’s dog-like devotion to
Trump is not just a personal oddity, but a breach of his duty of care. Fifa is
non-political. Fifa is an administrator, not a player on the stage. Fifa has no
mandate to use football’s popularity to endorse a movement, to be present while
globally significant arms sales and nuclear cooperation are agreed.
The day
before the Ronaldo buffet, Infantino sat nodding along while Trump talked about
moving World Cup games from cities run by his political opponents and
threatened to bomb Fifa’s co-host Mexico. Trump is already shaping this global
show as a projector screen for his own divisive politics and the power-play
with fellow autocrats, to the extent it is fair to say the US World Cup is as
bad as Qatar and Russia on a register of political cynicism. At least neither
of those two ever pretended to be the world’s leading liberal democracy.
There was
an obvious emotional counterpoint this week in the glimpses of that other
sporting world, Troy Parrott saying: “That’s why we love football,” the joy of
Scotland’s qualification, little shots of beauty that keep you coming. We don’t
have to give up on the World Cup. But we can give up on the people who have
weaponised it. And demand, wherever it is still possible, a great deal better
than this.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário