Cristiano Ronaldo: The Biography. Guillem Balague. The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, £8.99
The problem with Cristiano Ronaldo is summed up in one famous photograph. Towards the end of the Champions League Final in May 2014, the great man converted a penalty to put Real Madrid 4-1 up against local rivals Atletico Madrid. Los Blancos were seconds away from securing La Décima, their long-coveted and unprecedented 10th European Cup.
The player raced to the corner of the pitch, ripping off his shirt as he ran, and as he came to a halt adopted a rigid bodybuilders’ pose, displaying his enviable physique to full effect. The message seemed clear: ‘I, the great Ronaldo, have delivered La Décima. Worship me.’
Well, he had and he hadn’t. Throughout that year’s competition, Cristiano had scored a record 17 goals. If any single player was responsible for Madrid’s achievement, it was he. But he’d also had a quiet final. By the time he stepped up to take the penalty the game was won, thanks to goals by Sergio Ramos, Gareth Bale and the Brazilian Marcelo. Nevertheless, Ronaldo celebrated as if he’d scored the winner, rather than simply added an extra dollop of icing to an already sumptuously-decorated cake.
This, then, is the problem with Ronaldo. In what is ostensibly a team sport, where success is built on unity, sacrifice, strategic and tactical planning and the occasional moment of individual brilliance, he is a pure egoist, driven by an unquenchable desire to be the greatest footballer who has ever lived – not just that, but to be acclaimed as such. This is his daily motivation. His team-mates are merely another part of the audience – they just happen to have the best seats in the house.
The truth, of course, is that he has a point. Ronaldo is sinfully skilful – despite being a 6’1” slab of muscle he is balletic on the pitch, a master of the feint and the dribble and the breathtakingly clever innovation. He goes like a rocket – in the dying minutes of a match in 2012-13, he ran 80 metres in 9.05 seconds, a speed at which he would have qualified for the final of the 100 metres at the London Olympics. He is as good with his head as with his feet, seeming at times to hang high in the air as if he has escaped the laws of conventional physics. He scatters long-standing goalscoring records, set by the game’s past titans, like so many skittles.
But while it is easy to look on superhumans with a kind of giddy reverence, they are often harder to like: that which makes them super also makes them less human. Ronaldo’s lust for glory, the reasons for it, the values that fire it, the monomaniacal, unflinching pursuit of it, the transparent, desperate need for it: all of this alien passion unnerves us mere mortals, arouses our suspicions, leaves us cold: what gives with this guy?
In ‘Cristiano Ronaldo, The Biography’, Spanish football journalist Guillem Balague attempts to blow away some of the fog. He only partially succeeds, probably due to his limited access to primary sources around the player. Balague had hoped the book would be officially authorised, but the pair fell out over the author’s previous work, a biography of Lionel Messi, in which it is claimed Ronaldo refers to his rival as ‘motherfucker’. The subsequent embarrassment and controversy ensured that co-operation was withdrawn. The shutters were slammed down in Camp Ronaldo.
Ali vs Frazier, Palmer vs Nicklaus, Senna vs Prost, Coe vs Ovett, Federer vs Nadal… all sports, all spectators of sport, require great rivalries, and all great sports stars require a great rival. Ronaldo has perhaps the most divinely chosen of them all. Leo Messi is the yin to Cristiano’s yang, the light to his shade, some would say the angel to his devil.
For all their similarities – bewilderingly talented attacking forwards, global superstars self-made from humble origins, towering twin peaks of the beautiful game – the pair could also hardly be less different. Messi is short, scruffy, modest and introverted, where Ronaldo is tall, groomed to within an inch of his life, arrogant and demanding. Messi, some advertising duties aside, is solely about the football, while Ronaldo has his CR7 fashion brand, which makes everything from shoes to underwear (and for which he models, naturally). Although the team at Barcelona is shaped to suit Messi’s style of play, he is recognisably a member of the unit, while Ronaldo rarely celebrates his team-mates’ goals and glares at them if they fail to do his bidding. Messi passes when Ronaldo would shoot. When Ronaldo is brought down, he sprawls and gesticulates and complains. Messi, who is kicked constantly (when anyone can catch him), simply gets up and carries on. It is impossible to imagine Messi winking at his bench after getting an opposing player sent off, as Ronaldo did when Wayne Rooney was dismissed during the 2006 World Cup. Messi would never say, as Ronaldo once did, ‘I am the first, second and third best players in the world.’
Balague recounts a conversation between a fellow Spanish journalist and Ronaldo. ‘He [Ronaldo] asked me why people loved Messi and not him. I told him that it was because Messi was much smarter than him. They may be equally arrogant on the pitch, but Leo always had kind words for his team-mates, always credited them for his success and normally celebrated goals, whether they were scored by him or someone else in the team, whether he liked it or not. Cristiano was the opposite: he always pointed to himself or his muscles, he seemed to celebrate his team-mates’ goals grudgingly and yet went really over the top when celebrating his own.’ Ronaldo’s surprising response to such bluntness was that he wanted to think about it all. It is perhaps no coincidence that he has worked to soften his public image in the past few years. Being likeable helps, especially when it comes to winning the votes of your peers that bring you top awards.
The reality is that, despite their many differences, and although they will never be close friends, both players have benefited enormously from the other. Perhaps the best comparison isn’t a sporting rivalry, but that between Lennon and McCartney. Throughout the 1960s, those two songwriters were a standing challenge to each other to go further than anyone had gone before – to innovate, to take risks, to do things that hadn’t been done before, to invent the future.
That is what Messi and Ronaldo do to one another. Before them, no one in Spanish football had scored more than 50 goals in a season. Ronaldo has now done so in five seasons, Messi in four. They both average more than a goal a game, an almost unthinkable statistic in football. Between them they have won the past seven Fifa Ballon d’Or awards (the prize for the best player in the world that year – Messi has four, Ronald three), with Messi expected to scoop this year’s too.
As the journalist Gabrielle Marcotti puts it, ‘we’re witnessing two men who are pushing the limits of their sport – two superstars who, technically and stylistically, are very much the product of this era yet somehow manage to transcend it too.’
Xavi, the majestic former Barca playmaker (who, had Ronaldo and Messi not existed, would probably be regarded as the finest footballer of the era), agrees. ‘He [Messi] wouldn’t be as good without Ronaldo. He wouldn’t have won all those Ballons d’Or. And I don’t think Ronaldo would have won them all too. They push each other.’
The ultimate question that obsesses every football fan is, of course, which of the two is superior. And is either actually The Greatest of All Time?
For Xavi at least, the answer is clear. ‘Pele and Diego Maradona both made a huge difference, but football has evolved. The players are better than they were, the game is better. Physically, tactically, technically and psychologically, football is better than ever. And Messi stands out as the best at the best time in the history of football.’
That is the kind of talk that only pushes Ronaldo, in his deathless perfectionism, to try all the harder. As he says, ‘I hope [Messi and I] end up laughing about all this when we look back on it together in a few years.’ But not yet. For now, each continues to strive to get his nose in front, to do extraordinary things, to go down in history as The One. Our final judgement can wait. Let’s simply think ourselves lucky to be football fans at this moment, sit back and marvel at the superhuman beauty.
