Welcome to the second edition of Row Z, our weekly column on The Athletic shining a light on the bonkers side of the game.
From clubs to managers, players to organisations, every Friday we’ll bring you the absurdities, the greed, the contradictions, the preposterousness and the oddities of the game we all love…
Cristiano Ronaldo’s new YouTube channel is a hilarious exercise in self-admiration, loaded with shamelessly narcissistic content. In a way, it’s a thing of beauty.
The wildly popular channel only launched last week but already has 52million subscribers, around one-sixth of the most-subscribed channel in the site’s history (MrBeast, 312million).
Quite what people are ‘siuuubscring’ for (yes, this is a thing) isn’t totally clear, unless you want to find out what Ronaldo’s favourite song is — spoiler alert, he doesn’t have one — or hear his wife Georgina rank his outfits from over the years.
Call Row Z an idealist, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if Ronaldo used his popularity and status to highlight horrendous acts of violence and oppression taking place in his new favourite country of Saudi Arabia?
Then again, perhaps not, given that, according to Amnesty International, people who are critical of the regime are imprisoned and even sentenced to death….
