“Welcome home, Cristiano,” said Manchester United’s Twitter feed, announcing the return of Cristiano Ronaldo to Old Trafford for a reported fee of €15 million plus €8 million in add-ons (roughly $26 million). Within an hour, that had been liked a million times and retweeted over 600,000 times. At the next shareholders conference call, CEO Ed Woodward will have some extraordinary social media engagement figures to report.
Of course Man United fans are excited. On Friday morning, they thought one of their all-time icons was going to be playing for their great rival, Manchester City. Instead they can welcome him back as one of their own—and happily forget that he seemed just as happy to pull on the sky blue shirt as Carlos Tevez had been until it transpired that Juventus was adamant about a transfer fee and City dropped its interest.