`I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player at 20 have so much’ – Bobby Robson on Barcelona’s boy wonder Ronaldo, who this week was named world player of 1996
SOCCER: Christopher Clarey
RONALDO may or may not be the next Pele, Diego Maradona or Marco van Basten. How can anyone know for certain what a newly wealthy and immensely talented 20-year-old striker with only a primary school education will make of his gifts?
For the moment, all that is clear is that Ronaldo Luis Nazario de Lima has the potential to be the game’s next “great one”, and in this satellite-driven, marketing-ridden age, that is enough to put the star-making machinery into overdrive. He is on the cover of this month’s World Soccer magazine under the headline The Best Ever?, and in Lisbon this week he was named Fifa’s 1996 world player of the year, with the previous winner George Weah finishing second and Alan Shearer third .
The fact that Ronaldo, like Pele, is a Brazilian of humble origins, and the fact that he is scoring goals at a blistering pace for Barcelona only makes the dollar and peseta signs spin faster.
“Will we control it?” Barcelona’s coach Bobby Robson said. “If it were left to the club, yes. But it’s not up to the club entirely, is it?” With that, Robson gestured toward the door separating the tranquil, private lounge from a room crowded with the scores of journalists who cover this club and, now, Ronaldo on a manic daily basis.
“How do you control that lot out there?” the former England manager continued. “You’d like to, but you can’t. They will write what they want. So you just hope that Ronaldo will have the intelligence and common sense to keep those feet on the ground.”
Those feet are what have caused the commotion. In July, Barcelona bought Ronaldo for a then record 12,2-million from PSV Eindhoven. In one season in the Brazilian first division and two in the Netherlands, he scored 108 goals in 110 matches. But despite Barcelona’s huge investment and Ronaldo’s already glowing international reputation the club was still unprepared for the force of his impact.
It was not just that Ronaldo, his head shaved la Michael Jordan, continued to score an average of one goal a game: the rate that defines super stardom in the sophisticated, defensive-minded modern game. It was the way he scored his goals, weaving or bulling his way past defenders, the ball clinging to his foot.
Ronaldo has remarkable speed and skill, but what separates him from fellow centre- forwards, including Romario, the diminutive hero of Brazil’s victory in the 1994 World Cup, is his strength. At 1,8m and 78kg, he looks a bit like a middleweight boxer with muscular shoulders and biceps.
And when opponents inevitably try to shove, hack or bump him off course, Ronaldo does not tumble melodramatically into a writhing heap in hope of hearing a referee’s whistle. He bounces off and dribbles on.
“I’ve been in soccer a long time,” said Robson. “And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player at 20 have so much.”
Those who watched Pele star in and win a World Cup at 17 might disagree. Brazil’s coach Mario Zagalo believes Ronaldo should learn how to pass. But even Pele concedes that Ronaldo is special. “The compliments he is receiving are not exaggerated,” Pele said. “I just think we need to make better comparisons.” For Pele, Ronaldo is not a creative force in both halves of the field the way he and Maradona were. Instead, he is the consummate finisher, like Van Basten.
In a match at Santiago de Compostella in October, Ronaldo embarked on a mesmerising 40m run in which he beat five players. By the time he scored, even the home fans were screaming in amazement. “Ronaldomania” had arrived.
“You know when you go to a club in Southern Europe that those leagues are on television throughout the world,” Ronaldo said. “The impact is much bigger.” And perhaps nowhere in the world does football matter quite as much as in Barcelona where the 115 000-seat Nou Camp stadium is as much a symbol of the city and the Catalan people as Antoni Gaudi’s unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral.
Ronaldo is not the first foreigner to make an impact in the red and blue of Barca. Johan Cruyff played there in the Seventies, later returning as coach; Maradona spent two seasons there in the early Eighties, as did Romario in the early Nineties. Now, Ronaldo is in a team overflowing with gifted extranjeros, such as his fellow Brazilian Giovanni, the Portuguese goalkeeper Vitor Baia and Bulgaria’s Hristo Stoichkov.
But despite such an array of talent, it has not all been plain sailing for Ronaldo and company. A thigh injury put him briefly out of action in November and last month Barcelona were beaten 2-0 by arch-rivals Real Madrid in the Bernabeu. That reverse prompted Ronaldo to question Robson’s tactics politely yet openly, and judging from the jeers for Barca’s 3-2 home defeat by Hercules recently, he is not the only one experiencing doubts.
While the city simmers, Ronaldo’s No 9 jersey is in every souvenir shop on Las Ramblas, the city’s most famous thoroughfare.
For the All Saints’ celebration in late October, pastry makers put small portraits of him on toothpicks and stuck them into their creations. “People are as crazy about soccer here as they are in Brazil, maybe even crazier,” Ronaldo said.
Born in Bento Riveiro, a very modest Rio suburb, Ronaldo grew up playing soccer on the streets and sleeping with a ball at night. His parents separated when he was 13, and his mother, Sonia, formerly a housewife, began selling pizzas to pay the bills.
He spent two years with the second-division club Sao Cristvao, coached by Brazil’s top scorer at the 1970 World Cup finals, Jairzinho, who is credited with discovering Ronaldo, or Rinaldinho, as he is known in Brazil. At 16, he signed his first professional contract with first division Cruizeiro in Belo Horizonte.
Ronaldo stayed only one season, earning slightly more than $2 000 for scoring 54 goals in 54 matches before signing with PSV Eindhoven, receiving a $390,000 rise. Before leaving for Europe, the then 17- year-old became Brazil’s youngest international since Pele, but he did nothing more than cheer from the bench at the 1994 World Cup.
“Sure, it was difficult, but I learned a lot watching,” Ronaldo said. “I am putting it to use now, and I plan on putting it to use in France in 1998 where Brazil will have a very young and very talented team.”
He should be the next World Cup’s main attraction and, well aware of that, Barcelona have extended his contract to 2006 and doubled his annual salary to 2,5- million. They have also more than doubled the amount of any eventual transfer fee, to a world-record 47-million, to discourage attempts by European rivals such as Milan to lure him.
Ronaldo has a house near the beach in the Barcelona suburb of Castelldefels and a contract with Nike. He has two studs in his left ear and an expanding entourage including financial advisers and new friends. What he does not have, at least for the moment, is an attitude problem.
“I think in every club it is the same, that all the players are equal,” he said. “We are all playing with the same goal: winning games. I like it that way: no star, everybody the same. It was that way at PSV, and it’s that way in Barcelona within the team. It’s only outside that it is different.”
Ronaldo is well aware of how celebrity affected the uneducated Maradona; how the Argentine’s numerous off-field problems and poor character judgments eventually sent his reputation and skills plummeting.
“There’s no doubt that we all can learn from what happened to Maradona,” he said. “There are a lot of bad people in soccer, and they try to take advantage of us.
“About Maradona, they told a lot of stories, and I don’t know which of these stories are true. So, I can’t talk about Maradona outside the soccer field. But on the field, I saw him a lot and he is a great example.
“Now, I also live here in Barcelona. I see what’s happening. I see what people are doing and sometimes it’s a very difficult situation; people trying to use you. It depends on the player whether he needs protection or not. I have a strong personality. I know what the people want from me. I know with whom I can go and talk, and with whom I cannot.”
As Ronaldo sat there, self-image and baseball cap well adjusted, a gap-toothed smirk playing on his slightly chubby face, it seemed conceivable that this time, the game just might not eat its young.