Man Utd striker Cristiano Ronaldo has been told he will “end up in the bloody jungle with Matt Hancock” by Simon Jordan after the Portugal international’s controversial interview with Piers Morgan.
The 37-year-old – who looked to leave Old Trafford in the summer – has done a 90-minute interview that will be aired on Talk TV over the next couple of nights with clips of it released on social media and The Sun earlier this week.
Ronaldo has criticised Man Utd, Erik ten Hag, former interim boss Ralf Rangnick, Gary Neville, Wayne Rooney and others in an explosive interview.
He insisted that former Man Utd team-mates Neville and Rooney were “not my friends” after their recent criticism of him.
Former Crystal Palace chairman thinks that’s “fair enough” but thinks the Man Utd striker is “getting drunk on his own recognisability”.
When asked about Ronaldo saying that Neville and Rooney aren’t his mates, Jordan told talkSPORT: “That’s fair enough, isn’t it? They don’t have to be his friends.
“Ultimately, if they didn’t speak out with their views and what they think then perhaps he’d have a different view of them.
“I’m struggling with this whole thing. We’ve only seen a couple of minutes of it and we’re all launching these 1000 opinions, but some of the allegations made about lack of respect and sensitivity towards tragedies from what we’ve seen from Ronaldo to Piers Morgan.
“I understand why this is a great scoop for Piers Morgan. I don’t understand why Cristiano Ronaldo would want to give him this and turn it into what it’s potentially going to be turned into.
“Ultimately Cristiano Ronaldo will be in grave jeopardy of coming out of this in the wrong way and people will look at it the wrong way.
“Having been a club owner and being in a situation with a strong attitude towards players – I’m a strong person and can lack empathy at times – if a player came to me with the tragedies that Cristiano Ronaldo has experienced in his life and the difficulties he was having with another child, there’s not a parallel universe where anybody is going to disrespect that and demand that he turns up for training.
“I find that difficult to get my head around. I look at this and if this was Manchester United doing this to him about what he was doing, he would citing constructive dismissal. This feels like a player wanting to get out of something and I’m so surprised by people like Graeme Souness and the take they have which is that this guy has justification for behaving in this way.
“No one can be told that they’re going to play forever. This guy is getting drunk on his own recognisability and he’ll end up in the bloody jungle with Matt Hancock in a years’ time if he carries on in this way!
“I look at it and I find it disappointing because he is a wonderful player. I find it depressing because players drive the football world. There’s a chain of authority and they are the end-game.
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“Yes he has half a billion followers and yes they can sensationalise it into this awful life story, but we’re talking about a player who is getting paid half a million pounds a week by the Glazers who he suggests don’t care about the football club. Has he forgotten that they’re paying him half a million pounds a week?
“He wants out of there and my understanding of it is that people are running around getting South American players, influential people who might be attached to Ronaldo and trying to get South American players into Man United because they know they’re getting Ronaldo out.
“Think about that when we listen to this 90-minute interview on Wednesday and Thursday. Think about the backstory of what’s really going on.
“This is a player that clearly doesn’t want to be at Man United because it doesn’t fit with where he thinks he should be.”
And Jordan insists that if he was the owner of Man Utd he would sack Ronaldo if he had the chance to.
Jordan added on talkSPORT: “I hope they do [sack him].
“If this was me and this was being said about my football club and a lot of it was steeped in misrepresentation to engender an outcome, I would cut him off at the knees.”
