Atletico Madrid supporters have started a Twitter campaign urging their club not to sign wantaway Manchester United star Cristiano Ronaldo.

After returning to United last summer after an absence of 11 years, Ronaldo, 37, wants to leave after just one season. The Portuguese is said to be desperate to play Champions League football.

Atletico is now emerging as the player’s most likely destination should he leave United. A number of clubs have been vying for his signature, including Chelsea earlier in the transfer window.

On social media, a few Los Colchoneros supporters have made it obvious that they do not want the team to sign Ronaldo.

Using the hashtag ‘Contra CR7’ (against CR7) on Twitter, supporters have tweeted things as dramatic as threatening to cancel their memberships with the club should they sign the former Real Madrid player.

‘If this one (Ronaldo) comes to my Atleti, I will cancel my two subscriptions…. We are not an asylum to collect scum,’ one supporter tweeted.

The animosity between the club and the player of course stretches back to his enormously successful nine-year stay at city rivals Real Madrid.

During that time, Atleti emerged under Diego Simeone to challenge Real Madrid and Barcelona for league titles and domestic competitions. It was in the Champions League, however, with Real Madrid beating Atleti in the finals of 2014 and 2016, as well as beating them in the semi-finals of the competition in 2017.

Ronaldo, typically, had a major part to play in all three of those occasions. He scored the fourth in Real Madrid’s 4-1 win in 2014, removing his top after netting his penalty in extra time. He then scored the winning penalty in the shootout at the San Siro in 2016 and in 2017 he scored a first-leg hat-trick at the Bernabeu.

He continued to haunt the club after that. The Atleti supporters may have believed they had seen the last of him when he joined Juventus in 2018. But that was not to be. The Portuguese inflicted even more suffering on the supporters of Madrid’s traditional second club during that season’s Champions League with a second-leg hat-trick.

Fans even said they’d rather lose than sign the player, expressing their outrage at the notion the club would even consider working with someone who had been their arch rival for so long.