For the second-best league in the world, Spain are not doing badly. The national team are the European champions and favourites for the World Cup next summer, a sizeable jump ahead of England.

Barcelona are comfortably the best club side on the planet, having put Manchester United firmly in their place in the Champions League final a fortnight ago.

Then there is the fact that Real Madrid have just signed the two most coveted players in the world for eye-watering fees, re-establishing Barcelona-Real as the fixture that you would sell your children to watch. It last finished 6-2 to Barcelona and the early betting is on the next one finishing 8-8.

Like we said, not bad for a country that, we have often told ourselves, must look at the English Premier League and wonder how it can catch up. The best league in the world? Everyone believes that they have the prettiest wife at home, as Arsène Wenger once said.

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Ronaldo fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful

Simon Barnes

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80m reasons why Ronaldo sale made sense

Sir Alex Ferguson and David Gill both knew that when Real came in with £80m bid it was simply an offer they could not refuse

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Whatever your stance, Cristiano Ronaldo being lured from Old Trafford to the Bernabéu should not tip the balance one way or the other. He is a single footballer, albeit the most expensive and, as of yesterday, the most talked-about.

But a bit like those 90 minutes at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, at the very least his move to Spain should put a brake on any signs of English smugness.

There is much for the Premier League to be happy about, but Ronaldo’s transfer reminds us that while the best marketeers employed by Richard Scudamore, the chief executive, can conquer new fields in the Far East, there is one place they struggle to reach — into the childhood dreams of young boys across swaths of southern Europe and South America.

In Madeira, in their schoolyard games, they imagine pulling on the white shirt of Real, not the red of United, and it is the same for millions of kids from Buenos Aires to São Paulo.

It is why, for all the great players who have passed through England — and Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp and Ronaldo rank as the outstanding trio — we have never had an Argentine or Brazilian superstar. No Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Kaká or Ronaldinho. No Messi or Maradona. Robinho, yes, but only after he had fallen out with Real. The less said about Juan Sebastián Verón the better.

We wish it were not so, but United had always accepted the lure of Spain as a fact of life with Ronaldo. They would get the best from him for as long as they could, then wave him off one day to the Bernabéu.

Ronaldo was going to play for Real sooner or later, and an offer that neither he nor United could refuse has made it happen after several years of flirting. That is no reason to give Ronaldo a hard time, even though he may well find that his dreams of life at Real clash with reality.

We can safely assume that the money has played its part in swaying Ronaldo’s mind, but he has never made any secret of his ambitions to play for the club who have won the European Cup nine times.

We will still be able to watch him, thanks to television coverage of La Liga and inevitable clashes in the Champions League, but the English league will be poorer for his absence. Whatever your feelings about him, and his antics, our game can only be enhanced by outstanding talents.

So while our Premier League can claim it is the richest (measuring overall turnover, not debt), the most popular for overseas investors and spectators at home and abroad, and with the most customer-friendly modern stadiums and most lucrative television deals, we have seen in recent weeks the limit to its clout.

There are a million different ways of measuring respective strengths, but Spain have the Champions League and will fancy their chances of retaining it.

We have their Cesc Fàbregas and Fernando Torres — but then they do not want our Gareth Barry and Emile Heskey, thank you very much.

Now they have Ronaldo, and it was always going to be that way one day. The money has spoken, but it goes deeper than that.