No wonder Ronaldo’s quitting Man Utd – he’s pure Hollywood in a team of mediocre Love Island wannabes, says Piers Morgan

If you had a choice of role models for your children, who would you choose between Cristiano Ronaldo and a Love Island contestant?

One is the greatest footballer in history and a supremely dedicated athlete with an astonishingly intensive work ethic and health regime.

The other, and I’m talking generally, but I fear accurately, here, is a lazy, spoiled, deluded halfwit who thinks – sadly, with some justification these days – that success and fame can be achieved by behaving like a brain-dead lecherous tool on TV.

Yet, horrifyingly, many young people are gravitating towards Love Island lifestyle choices, sensing it’s a damn sight easier than actually working for a living, or developing and nurturing a genuine talent.

To them, racking up social media ‘likes’ for their vacuous antics is the only validation they need to think they’ve ‘made it.’

I thought of this depressing reality when I heard the entirely unsurprising news that Ronaldo wants to quit Manchester United because he doesn’t think the club shares his ferocious ambition.

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At the heart of his discontent is his belief that not only is the club being very poorly run compared to his first stint there, but many of the younger players just don’t have the same attitude to winning that he had and continues to have.

Nobody in the history of world sport hates losing more than Ronaldo, with the possible exception of me when I play my kids at Tiddlywinks.

And his burning frustration at United’s malaise – they finished 6^th in the Premier League and failed to qualify for the Champions League – has finally boiled over.

Ronaldo still has incredible hunger, desire, ambition and will to win raging inside his soul like a spewing volcano, which is staggering for someone who is now 37 and has already achieved so much in the game.

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But there are numerous ‘stars’ wearing the shirt at the club now, and banking huge cheques each week for rankly mediocre performances, whose only real passion, hunger and desire seems to be for self-promotional off-field activities, Twitter/Instagram affirmation, and partying – not putting in the hard yards that it takes to be winners.

They’re the football equivalent of Love Islanders, a show you can bet your life they all avidly watch.

And for someone like Ronaldo, that lack of laser-like focus on what really matters, the football, is what’s really behind his decision to want to leave.

Yes, he wants to play in the Champions League.

Why the hell wouldn’t he? He’s the greatest champion in the history of the game.

Watch Piers Morgan Uncensored weekdays on Sky 526, Virgin Media 627, Freeview 237, Freesat 217 or on Fox Nation in the US

And to those ludicrous football writers trying to make out HE was the problem last season, let me remind them that Ronaldo scored 24 goals including six in the Champions League and 18 in the Premier League, coming 3^rd in the Golden Boot competition and beating England’s top striker Harry Kane with one more league goal, despite being nine years older.

Spoiled brats

He wasn’t the ‘problem’ – he was the only thing stopping United from battling relegation.

The real problem was the shockingly unmotivated collection of ineffectual, mentally weak wastrels around him.

Why should Ronaldo waste another second of his phenomenally valuable time and talent trying to elevate a bunch of over-paid, pampered, prima donna spoiled brats to his level when so many of them just aren’t interested?

It may beggar belief that United’s younger players wouldn’t hang on his every word given his astonishing success and experience, in the way that he used to with older players like Roy Keane when he was a teenager at the club.

But many of them don’t.

They’re too rich, too arrogant, too stupid, too lacking in humility and self-awareness, to tap the brain of the GOAT of their sport, despite possessing trophy cabinets so empty even spiders don’t go inside for fear of getting lonely.

For a clue to this dismal attitude, look no further than an interview Ronaldo gave at the start of this year to Premier League Productions in which he said: “The older players can always help the young players but if I give you advice, and you don’t implant that in a daily life it will be difficult.

“You can speak all day with that person. If it’s not coming from inside of you, it’s impossible.

“I remember when I was 18, 19, 20, some old players speak with me and I put that as, “Cristiano, you know you have to improve. They know more than you, they are more experienced than you.

“But (current young professional players), they don’t accept that if you criticise them.”

Ronaldo added: “My main point is it should come from inside you. You should be proud of yourself, look in the mirror and say: ‘I gave everything.’

“We are here to help when they need my help, my support, my advice, I will be the number one to help but if you don’t want my help, do your job, look for yourself and do your best to help the team.”

He said he was talking about young players generally, not just at United, but he could have been talking about so many young people in today’s snowflake society.

And United fans will know who he was really talking about. 

That’s why he’s off

Can the likes of Sancho, Lingard, Martial and McTominay really look in the mirror and say they have given it everything?

Can even Marcus Rashford, so impressive off the pitch with his relentless campaigning of the government over food for poor kids, be happy with his lacklustre contributions on the pitch that have seen him fall off Gareth Southgate’s England radar?

If anyone perfectly exemplifies Ronaldo’s criticism, it would be Mason Greenwood.

Before he was arrested on sexual assault charges in January, after which he was suspended, as a footballer he stood out as a smug, snarling, cocky little berk with a stupefyingly deluded sense of his own importance for someone who’s never won a major trophy for club or country.

And his dismissive body language towards Ronaldo, whose own trophy cabinet would barely fit inside the Grand Canyon, suggested that he, Mason Greenwood, was simply too good to be sharing a pitch with the old dude in the Nike Mercurials.

Greenwood would make a perfect Love Island contestant – dumb as a rock.

As would Manchester City’s Jack Grealish, someone destined to waste his supreme natural ability because he never looks happier than when’s he’s reeling out of a nightclub drunk as a skunk.

Cristiano Ronaldo, who’s never happier than when he’s training to improve himself, finds this Love Islander attitude inexplicable in professional footballers.

That’s why he’s off.

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And when some of those young United players doubtless shrug off his departure with a dismissive ‘whateva’, here’s one final fact for them to consider: Manchester United didn’t win a single game without him last season.

Winners, with a winning mentality, tend to win.

Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk