Cristiano Ronaldo and Sepp Blatter's Looney Tunes Duet

Another mad solo from Sepp Blatter would have been bad enough, but before last week was over, we had to endure a Looney Tunes duet as Cristiano Ronaldo decided to harmonise with the FIFA president on the theme of the enslavement of today’s multi-millionaire footballers.

The first thought evoked by their words was that with so much rubbish in their heads, they should be wearing dustbin lids as hats.

Yet, if the views themselves cannot be taken seriously (Blatter claimed that “in football, there’s too much modern slavery” and Ronaldo enthusiastically concurred), the fact that they were expressed by two such disparate, but prominent, figures in the game, the 72-year old who is its supreme legislator and a 23-year old who is its most coveted player, is sadly significant.

It gives us a further depressing, though scarcely necessary, warning of how soon the world’s most popular sport may, at the highest professional levels, be stripped of anything resembling reasonable principles for conducting business and left with nothing in its place but an egotists’ charter.

Blatter and Ronaldo were brought together by coinciding self-interests. As the importance of international football is increasingly besieged by the swelling power of Europe’s wealthiest clubs, the leader of the global governing body seldom neglects an opportunity to inflict embarrassment, or worse, on those he sees as menacing his status.

There might be more sympathy for his resistance to the rampant growth of club influence, and especially to the presumptuousness of the Premier League, if his presidency weren’t so difficult to associate with integrity, and his insatiable urge to spout propaganda didn’t produce quite as many indefensible utterances.

He shouldn’t draw comfort from the endorsement of Ronaldo, whose justification for considering himself a slave is the reluctance of Manchester United to let him walk out on a freely-entered contract that is reported to pay him £120,000 per week and is still four years from expiration.

Gratitude for the brilliance with which Ronaldo has enriched English football has been inexorably eroded by the preening vanity and scorn for all who embraced and nurtured him at Old Trafford and have marked his determined efforts to decamp to Real Madrid.

He is at present on crutches as the result of ankle surgery, but is still doing a bit of metaphorical foot stamping in a tiresome impersonation of a playground tantrum.

Even among the staunchest United supporters—the tens of thousands who were thrilled to the point of worship by the dazzling skills and torrent of goals that contributed so spectacularly to their team’s recent triumphs—his protracted and intolerably boring courtship dance with Ramon Calderon, the Spanish champions’ president, has created substantial pockets of resentful disillusionment.

Many fans have naturally concluded that, after all the dismissive declarations he has made, he could never again be fully committed to their cause, and in their bitterness they are ready to envisage a Manchester landscape without the twin towers of his talent and his selfishness. They wouldn’t weep if Sir Alex Ferguson eventually had to measure Ronaldo’s value in money.

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