Personally I don’t see this is as a bad situation at all for United. One of the biggest gripes I, and many others, have had with United is the mentality of our players and that at times we’ve looked like a squad without harmony and without focus and motivation. ETH could use this as a weapon to create a siege mentality and to really bring our squad together. Are there likely to be many players in our squad who have a strong allegiance to Ronaldo that’ll be really destabilised by this? Perhaps a couple. But manageable in my opinion. ETH has been handed an easy method of bringing his squad together, showing them that performance and dedication matters and not history, and a way from moving on from a player who is done.
Some say the media distraction will be problematic. I personally disagree. ETH just has to professionally handle the questions that will come his way, the players can be instructed not to get involved, and internally we can make this a positive. How we deal with him is irrelevant to me. He gets paid, he doesn’t, whatever. I don’t care. The bigger picture is we can now easily marginalise and move on from him. And then turn this into a positive to motivate our team.