Graphic: come in No7, your time is up

When it came down to it, after all the bluster had subsided, it was an offer that Manchester United could not refuse. David Gill, the chief executive, scrutinised the numbers on the fax and immediately called Sir Alex Ferguson, who digested the figures and said what they both knew, which was that the time had come to sell the World Player of the Year.

Six months earlier Ferguson had infamously said of Real Madrid that he “wouldn’t sell that mob a virus”, never mind Cristiano Ronaldo. Six months before that, when Ronaldo was pleading to be allowed to follow his dream, Ferguson had suggested that Real would have to climb over his dead body before he agreed to sell. Rewind another six months and Gill, a man not known for shooting from the lip, was saying “you can’t sell players like Cristiano — it wouldn’t make sense”. But when he and Ferguson were faced with a mind-boggling offer of £80 million on Wednesday night, it suddenly did make sense.

By coincidence, the bid came on the night of June 10, six years to the day after United had agreed to sell David Beckham to Barcelona, a decision that effectively sealed the departure of the England captain at the time, albeit ultimately to Madrid.

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Now, as then, Ferguson took the call while on holiday in the South of France. Now, as then, the subject of the bid is hanging out in Los Angeles. Now, as then, the portrayal is of a narcissist who thinks he has outgrown the club. And now, as then, a decision that is perfectly legitimate, both from a football and a business viewpoint, leaves United looking for more than just a new No 7.

When United sold Beckham to Real in 2003 — with few were willing to share Ferguson’s correct appraisal that, at 28, the player’s best years were behind him — they targeted Ronaldinho and Harry Kewell as replacements before settling on a gawky, pimply 18-year-old from Sporting who wore braces on his teeth and went by the name Ronaldo.

This was a matter of months after the original Ronaldo had earned a standing ovation at Old Trafford for a hat-trick for Real against United in the second leg of a Champions League quarter-final. Although United’s supporters serenaded their new signing with chants of “there’s only one Ronaldo”, nobody dared to imagine that this one would prove even better than the Real thing.

Had Ronaldo left United in 2006, when Real first came calling, he would have been recalled as a self-indulgent brat who never quite adapted to the physical demands of English football and whose pleas for special treatment, on the training ground and among the muck and nettles of the Premier League, marked him down as a lightweight. It was the season after that the penny dropped and Ronaldo seemed to morph overnight into the most penetrative forward on the planet. By the end of that season, Ferguson was saying that “it’s now left to people to see if he’s as good as Pelé and Maradona”.

That is a debate that now moves to Real, a club where Beckham, like Luís Figo, the original Ronaldo and even Zinédine Zidane, did not quite make their mark on the pantheon in the manner they would have liked. Football these days is, like women’s tennis, a fleeting career at the highest level. The examples of Ronaldo (the Brazilian), Ronaldinho and Rivaldo suggest that greatness attained in a player’s mid-twenties is not always enduring.

Real’s two exorbitant new signings, Ronaldo and Kaká, must hope, with Lionel Messi, that they are better equipped to endure the physical and mental demands of the game. Mark Hughes, the Manchester City manager, has already made the doom-laden prediction that Ronaldo’s unusual style of taking free kicks will leave him with severe knee troubles.

Whatever Ronaldo’s destiny, it was never going to be fulfilled in Manchester, where, for all his success and riches, he always seemed a sad figure. He had a gaudy £4 million mansion built in the leafy village of Alderley Edge, complete with sauna, cinema and “media room”, but he pined for the sunshine and the perceived glamour of Madrid. The only girlfriends he had were Portuguese or Spanish.

Manchester was where he made his name — and he devoted himself to doing so, spending hours on the training ground — but Madrid was always where he saw his future. By the time he opened a fashion boutique in the Spanish capital — calling it CR7, presumably after a postcode area on the outskirts of Croydon — the writing was on the wall.

The question is how United bounce back and how they prove, having sold their best player to Real, that they are as attractive as they like to believe. Gill once said that they have never sold a player they did not want to keep, pointing out that Beckham, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Gabriel Heinze were surplus to Ferguson’s requirements when they were sold to the nine-times European champions. But all three, like Ronaldo, had been indispensable 12 months earlier until they started to grow restless. Whatever Ferguson’s undoubted strengths, a fourth sale to Real in six years shows that player power is one force even he cannot quell.

The hole left by Ronaldo’s departure is enormous. United have lost not only a world-class forward but their only genuinely prolific goalscorer. But his heart was never truly in it. It was never going to last. One figure from Old Trafford characterised it yesterday as “a rocky marriage, but the sex was great”. It is a splendid analogy.

Both parties knew it was not for ever and both were determined to enjoy it while it lasted. And, for United, the ignominy of being dumped for a richer, more attractive model was worth it for the most lucrative divorce settlement in football history. And, of course, the thrilling memories.