Cristiano Ronaldo played his 941st professional game last week in a secondary tournament he tried to shun, and at the auxiliary home of a Soviet-sympathizing club from an unrecognized breakaway state bordered by two of Europe’s poorest countries.Ronaldo, of course, never expected nor wanted his ebbing career to come to this, but here we are.He was dueling with Sheriff Tiraspol on Thursday because Manchester United, with its season careening toward wreckage last month, benched Ronaldo and immediately rebounded. The Red Devils buzzed around Old Trafford in his absence, beating Liverpool, Southampton, Leicester City and Arsenal, and exemplifying what team success in modern soccer looks like.Ronaldo, meanwhile, has been relegated to Europa League duties and uneventful late-game cameos. Two months ago, he requested a transfer that implied he was better than Man United; now, it has become clear that United — like the dozens of clubs who declined to sign Ronaldo this summer — is better without him.So Ronaldo, at age<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cristiano Ronaldo played his 941st professional game last week in a secondary tournament he tried to shun, and at the auxiliary home of a Soviet-sympathizing club from an unrecognized breakaway<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,135],"tags":[142,139,138,58],"class_list":["post-134043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-premier-league","tag-champions-league","tag-premier-league","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}