“Maybe other players felt less important” Former Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer believes that in hindsight, signing Cristiano Ronaldo may have been a mistake during his time at the club

**Quotes**

Ole Gunnar Solskjær on Cristiano Ronaldo re-joining:

> “He’d probably score more than Erling Haaland is doing at the moment [for Manchester City]. So I speak to Cristiano, we get him to mufc but I think maybe that effected the whole dressing room, the dynamics in the dressing room…”

> “Maybe other players felt less important because, obviously, this is one of the world superstars that comes in. He did well, he was top scorer that year with 24 goals or something, but I was out of a job 10 weeks later…”

Who would’ve thought signing an old Striker when the squad needed three midfielders (2 DMs 1 CAM) was a bad idea.

We also had Cavani/Martial and one of them shoud’ve been sold before getting another striker.

Just absolutely dogshit squad planning from the board.

This was very evident.

But at the same time, there would have been riots if Ronaldo had gone to City. I don’t think our leadership was stable enough or the fan base mature enough to handle such a move.

I’m more than convinced Cavani downed the tools after how he was treated since Ronaldo’s return.

I think cristiano and pep would have been a marriage made in hell . Wouldn’t have lasted anyway . Cristiano wouldn’t be running as much as pep wanted

Finally 🙏

I’ll be honest the Ronaldo transfer gets a lot of hate on here and people act like that is why that season fell apart when it’s not true.

All the issues that existed in that season were basically there the season before and Bruno dragged us back into match after match where we would be dreadful and go down against teams. Everyone was all excited about the comeback wins but good teams do not go down in matches over and over again and come back to win. You need the ability to do that to win a title but that shouldn’t be the norm.

Beyond that, we were basically done for the window when Ronaldo became available and we overextended ourselves to get him to come back. There wasn’t some midfield rebuild that was going to occur and Ronaldo stopped that. We signed Sancho and Varane for a lot of money and that was the window.

The whole thing is overblown. Did it work out? No. Would that season have been a disaster if we hadn’t signed Ronaldo? Highly likely. The cracks were all there before Ronaldo showed up.

Seems like more of a club decision to sign Ronaldo and Ole just had to give the green light. I can’t really blame Ole for the way his tenure ended, it was kind of inevitable that our style of play was going to dry up eventually. I’ll always remember how Ronaldo did pull off some great goals those first few months, it wasn’t an entire disaster from the start. At the end of the day we took a risk and it didn’t pay off, just move on.

Speaks volumes about Ronaldo that he could have entertained going to City, knowing him he would have. But I also feel it was a ploy by Jorge Mendes to make us jump in for his no. 1 player. PSG had Messi otherwise he would have gone there for sure that season.