We can only hope that someone is at work cutting and splicing that new Nike ad for Euro 2016 into an alternative narrative in which Cristiano Ronaldo collides with an opponent in St-Étienne on Tuesday night and, in keeping with the body-swap trope, lives the rest of his life as a retired Icelandic footballer catching puffins in the Westman Islands.
If you have not yet seen the Nike commercial “The Switch”, in which Ronaldo swaps lives with a teenager from Manchester, then you have not yet glimpsed the full extent of the cult of one of world football’s two biggest stars.
There was a time when Nike’s marquee tournament adverts would treat all of their big-gun endorsees equally, a kind of Ocean’s Elevensuper-cast of wooden acting stitched together with CGI. This year Nike used the likes of Harry Kane, Anthony Martial, Joe Hart and Javier Mascherano as little more than projections on the green screen behind the leading man.
No sign of Wayne Rooney however who, one hopes, drew the line at this kind of thing and you can only imagine what Zlatan Ibrahimovic, another Nike A-lister, would have said to the offer of a shift as a Ronaldo ensemble extra. Come the aftermath of Tuesday’s draw with Iceland, it was not the Ronaldo of Nike’s imagination who gave those remarkably sour post-match interviews, but the real Ronaldo demonstrating a serious deficit of graciousness towards the Nordic history men.
“A small country with a small mentality,” Ronaldo said, with no hint of irony. The response from Karo Arnason, the Iceland centre-half, was to the point. “What can I say?” he said, “tough s***”.
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