Cristiano Ronaldo

Real Madrid cruised to a 5-0 victory over Granada on Saturday, moving six points clear of Barcelona in the La Liga table. Goals from Karim Benzema, Cristiano Ronaldo, Carlos Casemiro and a brace from Isco condemned Granada to their tenth defeat of the season — they’re currently 19th in the table.

The Bernabeu crowd were treated to five goals within the hour, and Real Madrid made it 39 consecutive matches unbeaten, equalling the all time Spanish record.

The prematch festivities included a presentation of Cristiano Ronaldo’s fourth Ballon d’Or trophy. 

First grade is a time of personal discovery. At six years of age, it's a time when children learn simple things like raising their hands, not interrupting the speaker and respecting the feelings of others. It’s a time of collaboration, sharing and complex learning in different subject areas.

Unless your Cristiano Ronaldo Jr, whose elementary experience is, according to his father, like braving the comment section of any soccer website — the one place where you'll never find co-operation, manners and mutual respect.

The Barcelona and Real Madrid attacking trios of MSN and BBC took to Instagram to show us how they celebrated the New Year. From all of us at The18, we wish you nothing but the best for 2017!

Barcelona's MSN

Lionel Messi

The exorbitant fees that the Chinese Super League has been willing to pay to land the world’s best look like peanuts compared to what one unnamed CSL club was willing to pay Real Madrid and Cristiano Ronaldo to bring the Ballon d’Or winner to East Asia.

Cristiano Ronaldo would like everyone's help choosing a watch, because companies just send him sh*t to wear and then send him money to tweet inane tweets about their products.

Case in point:

The end of the year is approaching. Which @TAGHeuer timepiece should I choose? Sporty or elegant? #DontCrackUnderPressure pic.twitter.com/xuwm2ErjYo

A country's awarding of their footballer of the year award ultimately says a lot about the state of the game within that nation. For example, knowing that Argentina are loaded with talent but that one man has managed to win this individual prize on 10 occasions speaks to his standing as one of the greatest of all time.

For other nations, a player sweeping the prize time after time shows that he’s single-handedly carrying that nation to new heights à la Gareth Bale. These are the players that’ve utterly dominated their country’s player of the year award in recent times.