Vasco da Gama commanded the Portuguese fleet that opened up the sailing route from Europe to India round the Cape, five centuries ago.
Cristiano Ronaldo is a modern footballer whose global image and wealth reach further than the ancient mariners knew existed.
The evidence lies in Madeira, where Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro was born 32 years ago. It is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, a thousand kilometres from Portugal and 500km from the North African coastline of Morocco.
There are football clubs in Brazil bearing the name Vasco da Gama, but no museum named after him. Yet there is in Funchal, Madeira’s main harbour, a museum dedicated exclusively to Ronaldo.
The Museu CR7, right next to the Pestana CR7 Hotel, is purpose built to house the 160 trophies so far awarded to him. CR7 is his initials and team number, and the symbol of his many brands. Cabinet space expands to accommodate the trophies that grow by the year. In 2016, Ronaldo swept the board as FIFA Player of the Year, France Football Ballon d’Or player of the year, Dongqiudi MVP from the major football website in China, and Facebook’s Player of the Year. A three-metre-high bronze statue on Museu CR7’s forecourt declares: “Cristiano Ronaldo - Melhor Jogador do Mundo” (Best Player in the World).
The stance captures his strutting preparation to take a free kick, the legs planted wide apart, arms stiffly reaching down. The talent is mighty, the ego mightier still.
And, the rewards are commensurate. On top of the $50 million salary that Real Madrid pays him, and the bonuses for winning the UEFA Champions League and the Euro national team championship with Portugal last year, come endorsement contracts linked to his fame through CR7 brands in anything from his underwear to perfume. Forbes magazine recently declared him the top earner in the entire sporting universe.
Forbes reckoned that his total income in 2016 exceeded $88 million—some $7 million ahead of Lionel Messi, $11 million more than the leading National Basketball Association star LeBron James.
Spain’s tax investigators are following up newspaper reports copiously detailing how Ronaldo, through his Portuguese agent, allegedly diverted more than 150 million euros of his “image rights” earnings to a tax haven in the British Virgin Islands.
“Do you think I am worried?” Ronaldo said at one award ceremony. “He who owes nothing, fears nothing.” A nice line that tripped off the tongue—like the ball sliding from his feet, like snow falling off a leaf.
Off stage, he told France Football: “I’m not a hypocrite, it would be lying to say that it doesn’t ruin my pleasure. Not only for me, but also for the people who are with me—my family, my son, all those who work for me.”
Ronaldo’s tax inquisition may run its course over several years, just as similar probes in Barcelona led to Messi and Neymar Jr being convicted. They could have gone to prison, but in the end it came to financial settlements between players, their financial advisers and the state.
The inevitable comparisons between Ronaldo and Messi start and end with the question: Who is the greatest player of them all?
They suffer from being in the game at the same epoch. Both are truly exceptional not simply in the way they elevate their game, but by the astonishing longevity and consistency through which they sustain performance.
Year after year, it is either Ronaldo or Leo who captures the Ballon d’Or. They transcend the others, not simply in the global sport today but over the century when perhaps only Pelé, Di Stefano, Maradona, Puskas, Cruyff and Zidane come even close.
How can anyone compare individuals in a team game over different spans of time, during which the style and nature of the game have speeded up beyond recognition? Or through the eras when defence was tailored specifically to try to subdue, by fair means or foul, the effects of these big game winners?
Ronaldo will be annoyed that this article even brings in the comparison to Messi. “Cristiano es Cristiano,” he says, “y Messi’s es Messi. You cannot compare a Ferrari with a Porsche, because it is a different engine.”
And then, alluding to his son, Ronaldo adds: “People even try to compare our sons when they were born, and talk about who is the fastest and smartest at school.”
Indeed so. But, perhaps Ronaldo invites the attention to his son when he takes onto the stage with him Cristiano junior, known affectionately to the family as Cristianinho.
Homework time with Cristiano Jr
The father, handsome in his tuxedo, accompanied by the six-year-old child, a miniature mirror image of him. Cristianinho, who is cared for by Ronaldo’s mother and whose own mother is thought to have been paid to keep secret their one-night stand in California, is possibly the only person in the world who can get away with telling his papa that kids in his class say Gareth Bale is faster than him at Madrid, or that Messi has a more magical left foot.
Let me declare the obvious: To my eyes, Messi is the more appealing personality. Messi makes football still look like child’s play, whereas Ronaldo makes the team play for him.
The conclusion can be a darned close run thing. Throughout almost a decade, Messi and Ronaldo have been omniscient in the main Ballon d’Or awards—Messi has five; Ronaldo four.
They scored as many as 50 goals apiece in little more than 50 games. And, in the Champions League they are far ahead of previous generations. Ronaldo, three years older than Messi, currently holds the record with 95 goals (from 133 games for Manchester United and Real Madrid), while Messi is catching up with 93 goals scored in 111 games, all for Barcelona.
The weakness of the award is that they honour individuality in a team sport. And, they invariably attach to the player whose team wins the prizes so that, no matter how exceptional a season a player enjoys, the awards follow the prize money.
Yet if science could craft the ideal soccer physique, Ronaldo, not Messi, would be the model. The Portuguese is much taller at 1.86m, and his body is sculpted through life-long gym work into supreme upper body, slender and sleek below the waist.
He has film-star dark looks, a peacock’s desire to display talent, and bravery to resist those who try to kick him out of his stride. Seldom has one witnessed a teenager, as Ronaldo first was when Manchester United bought him from Sporting of Lisbon, so quicksilver and so cocksure.
One game stood out when he played against Fulham in London, turning the game around through his dashing step-overs, his speed on the wings, his goals. Sir Alex Ferguson, the veteran United manager, literally danced with joy as he watched that youth display his talents.
Years later, when Ronaldo had been transferred for a world record sum (80 million pounds sterling) to Real Madrid, British sports scientists conducted a series of laboratory and field tests to try to determine what moved inside and out of Ronaldo.
Castrol oil company paid for the tests for a film documentary entitled “Castrol Edge Presents Ronaldo Tested to the Limit.” The researchers had Ronaldo breaking glass panels by aiming kicks at 130kmph. They had him volleying a moving ball in pitch darkness, relying on sound and reactions. They fitted electrodes to his anatomy. They equipped him with a device that measured the speed at which his brain reacted to movement.
What science could not determine is how much is what Ronaldo was born with, or to what degree nurture and sheer repetition to master skills rewarded him. His mother, Maria Delores, worked as a cook. His father, Dinis Aveiro, was a municipal gardener and kit man at the first youth team Ronaldo played for.
Dinis, a staunch Catholic, died from alcohol-related liver condition at the age of 52, and Maria survived cancer. Ronaldo never drinks, and has no tattoos because they might prevent him donating blood as he does several times every year.
For all his self-obsession as a player, and his addiction to enriching himself through the many brands he associates with, his commitment to Save the Children and to cancer charities is constant and real.
Endorsing CR7 footwear. But, where are you looking?
When an eight-year-old boy, Martinis, was orphaned by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and was found wearing a No 7 Portugal jersey at Aceh province, Indonesia, Ronaldo flew there to visit him, and to raise funds for reconstruction.
He can, of course, afford to be generous. He is also a parent, and still at heart playing a child’s game. He claims to take criticism with the proverbial pinch of salt. But, when Madrid supporters whistled him during a match at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium on January 29, he mouthed back, calling them sons of whores.
Then, he turned a sterile match into a 3-0 Madrid rout, sparking the opening goal with a deft pass and then striding through Real Sociedad’s defence to score the second.
The Real Madrid fans might be the most spoilt in the world. Ronaldo is the latest (perhaps the best) in a line of spectacular players from Alfredo di Stefano in the 1950s to Zinedine Zidane from 2001 to 2006. Ronaldo turned 32 on February 5. He might be losing a metre of that thrilling acceleration, yet his team manager, Zidane, can testify that with age the body might slow but the brain can speed up to compensate.
“When I signed my new contract,” Ronaldo said recently, “I said it would not be my last contract at Real Madrid, because I want to play until I am 41. I meant what I said, but at the same time in football nothing is guaranteed. If I feel like I am in good shape and I have no injuries, and I continue to be motivated, I will play until 35, 36, 37, 41 or 45. It is my passion.”
Another passion is making money. Ronaldo’s twitter feed this month ran a promotional line: “This Valentine’s Day give to your loved ones my ultimate comfort #CR7blankets. Save 15% with promo code:LOVECR7”
