Yet again Florentino Pérez gets his way by chucking some money around, groans Tim Stannard...
Well, that’s a bit of a bummer. A scintillating close-season long story that kept thousands in work over the stinky summer months is now over, to cause food riots sparked by starving journalists across the globe.
Sergio Ramos is set to stay at Real Madrid after all, say Marca. Until 2020. When he will be 40 or something. It is a soul-crushingly dull outcome to the opera akin to an Eastenders Christmas special, ending with a nice turkey dinner and snooze in front of the fire, rather than a body-deforming nano-virus or a wormhole in Dot Cotton’s Laundromat.
Sergi-oh, no
Now, what would have been a treat of an outcome was Sergio Ramos leaving Real Madrid to see Florentino Pérez losing two club captains and all-round figureheads in the space of a month. We would have then had the double pleasure of the Andalusian playing in a league with proper refereeing, as opposed to the red card fest of La Liga, while Real Madrid struggled on with Marcelo as club captain and Cristiano Ronaldo quite, quite furious about the concept.
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But for a few short weeks, the dream of football surreality seemed within reach. Tantalisingly so. Ramos had stormed into the Bernabéu demanding an exit, stormed off on holiday, stormed back, stormed to Australia and then China for a meeting with Florentino Pérez, where it seems that he has stormed into a huge pit of money - Marca report that the defender will be on €9m per year. Net. One thing’s for sure, though: Manchester United are not going to be happy bunnies.
AS reported on Wednesday that the Premier League outfit were most unhappy at Ramos already because the defender had not tried hard enough to extricate himself from the Santiago Bernabéu and the clutches of Florentino. The Old Trafford side will be hopping mad on Thursday now that the sensational stopper has apparently pledged his future to Madrid.
This may make it a little more likely that United gain some kind of revenge by digging their heels in over letting David de Gea out of his contract which still has a year to run. United might take the ultimate revenge in persuading Pérez that Phil Jones is both very good and very, very marketable and cheap at 200 million quid.
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Jose's jibes
One story set to make the front pages for a while is José Mourinho calling Rafa Benítez big-boned, in response to an interview with Mrs. Benítez saying that her husband was going around the clubs of Europe cleaning up Mourinho’s messes like a footballing dog warden.
Unfortunately Rafa Benítez wasn't biting by saying something equally as rude to the Chelsea manager, musing that he only wanted to talk about football. So that left two summer sizzler stories hitting brick walls in one day. A sad few hours in the life of La Liga Loca.
