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Portuguese legend Cristiano Ronaldo has exposed Manchester United owners and team management during an interview with sports journalist Piers Morgan. Recently, old quotes from former Man United players and coach including Zlatan Ibrahimović, Jose Mourinho, Alexis Sanchez among others have resurfaced, where they have ridiculed the Glazers family.
The 37-year-old Ronaldo spoke with Piers Morgan on his TV show and talked about his relationship with coach Erik ten Hag and exposed the internal issues in the club that hampers the club's evolution and growth.
Ronaldo told Morgan, " But you have some things inside that don’t help (us) reach the top level as City, Liverpool and even now Arsenal . . . a club with this dimension should be top of the tree in my opinion and they are not, unfortunately."
Jose Mourinho, Zlatan Ibrahimović and Alexis Sanchez old quotes resurface
Former Manchester United coach Jose Mourinho, who joined the club in 2016, left the Red Devils in 2018 before the completion of his three-year contract with the Premier League club. In 2019, Mourinho said, " If I tell you that I consider one of the greatest achievements of my career to have finished second with Manchester United in the Premier League, you will say, 'this guy is crazy'. But I said that because people don't know what's going on behind the scenes."
Similarly, the 41-year-old Zlatan Ibrahimović also mentioned in his autobiography Adrenaline about the 'closed mentality' in Man United. The AC Milan forward wrote, "Everyone thinks of United as a top club, one of the richest and most powerful in the world and seen from the outside it looked that way to me. But once I was there I found a small closed mentality."
Chile forward Alexis Sanchez joined Man United from Arsenal in 2018 and the 33-year-old forward asked his agent to go back to Arsenal after his first training session at the Old Trafford. " Sometimes there are things that you don't realise until you get there, and I remember the first training session I had, I realised a lot of things," Sanchez said.
Marseille forward continued, "After the session I got home and I told my family and my agent 'Can you not rip up the contract to go back to Arsenal?"
Apart from them, Belgian forward Romelu Lukaku, who joined the Red Devils in 2017, and Argentina star Angel Di Maria, who joined Man United in 2014, also talked about their respective time at the Old Trafford club earlier and hit out at the way they were treated by the club.