Ronaldo criticised by Ten Hag in new ESPN interview

Erik ten Hag has revisited his relationship with Cristiano Ronaldo in an interview on ESPN’s Goedemorgen Eredivisie. FCUpdate published its account on 1 November, describing a discussion about how a star player fits into a functioning team.

According to that report, Ten Hag argues that elite teams need leading players but that those players must accept the team’s requirements. He acknowledges Ronaldo’s standing among football’s greats while offering a sharply critical assessment of his later career, dating the decline he describes to the Juventus period.

Ten Hag also says he discussed expectations with Ronaldo before starting work at Manchester United. These are the coach’s recollections and judgments, reported by FCUpdate. They should not be read as an independently established account of every training session, or as proof that a particular career total is wrong.

The ESPN Netherlands post and programme video linked below provide a route to the interview. We could not directly play or read those first-party items during this check, so this summary is explicitly attributed to the accessible report rather than presented as a transcript we verified ourselves.