Somewhere in Brazil there is a man called Renato who had the chance to own 25% of Ronaldinho. A former player with Gremio in the southern city of Porto Alegre, Renato lent a sum of money — about £75 000 — to his old club, which had fallen on hard times. And when they proved unable to repay him in cash, they offered him a quarter-share in one of the promising local boys from their under-19 squad. Two were on offer: Ronaldinho or a midfield player called Tinga. Renato made his choice. ”I had read some good things about Tinga,” he said.
Eight years later, Tinga toils in relative obscurity. Ronaldinho, by contrast, went on to become the most coveted and richly rewarded of modern footballers, a World Cup winner and currently Fifa’s world player of the year for the second time in a row. Anyone who owned 25% of him would be a very rich former footballer indeed, since Ronaldinho receives a tax-paid salary of about £4,8-million a year from Barcelona under a deal renegotiated last year, while his transfer fee, should the club make the unthinkable decision to let him go, would burn a hole in Roman Abramovich’s pocket big enough to allow £100-million to pass through.
Superficially no more than an example of modern football’s absurd financial incontinence, these staggering sums assume a different aspect when Ronaldinho’s contribution to the game is taken into account. To a greater extent even than George Best or Johan Cruyff, the players whom he most closely resembles, he is a genuine original whose innovations will trickle down, in a diluted form, to those of lesser gifts.
At 26 he is in his prime, and his uniqueness is visible every time he takes the field. Earlier this month, during Barcelona’s last home match of the season, against their local rivals Espanyol, he celebrated the team’s second successive championship by performing a selection of his patented tricks — although tricks is scarcely the right word, since they tend to influence the course of a match rather than merely decorate its surface. The 90 000 spectators in the Nou Camp loved it, of course, but his teammates loved it even more.
”I knew about him before I came here,” Henrik Larsson said afterwards, still basking in the applause for his last home appearance in Barcelona’s colours, ”but to have the chance to play with him has been fantastic. I know that whenever I play and he’s playing, I only need to make the runs. There’s not many runs you make that he misses. He always sees you.”
Sometimes, indeed, he sees you even when he isn’t looking. One of the things he has brought to football is the blind pass, something he imported to the game after spending hours watching basketball videos and footage of Magic Johnson, his personal hero, in particular. Against Espanyol he performed two such ”no-look” passes, the first a glorious back heel played as a return pass to Samuel Eto’o.
For the second, executed as he ran towards goal in the inside-left channel, he suddenly turned his head and looked behind him, as though he had been tapped sharply on the shoulder; the defenders followed his gaze and were thus off balance when, in full stride and with his eyes still pointing in the direction from which he had come, he delivered an immaculately destructive pass into the stride of Larsson, who was running seven or eight yards ahead and slightly to his left.
”I always say that you always have to be on the move whenever Ronaldinho gets the ball,” the Swede said. ”Even when you don’t expect to receive it, you can receive it. So you have to be on your toes all the time.”
Ronaldinho’s deftness in tight spaces was developed during his years playing five-a-side futebol de salão, the precursor of the modern, Fifa-endorsed futsal. The earlier game, invented in South America in the 1930s, uses a smaller, heavier, much less bouncy ball, and from the age of 11 Ronaldinho spent two hours a night mastering its arts, in addition to four hours of conventional training with Gremio.
”He’s a great hybrid,” Simon Clifford, the English coach who preaches the gospel of Brazilian skills, said yesterday [Thursday]. ”He has all the little manoeuvres and body movements typical of a player with his background in futebol de salão, where space is so limited and you have to be able to trick your way past two or three opponents. He also shoots with his toe-end, as he did for that goal against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge last year, which is a trick used by futebol de salão players to prevent the goalkeeper getting time to set himself. But he can do all the other things as well — the shooting from long range, the passing over longer distances and so on.”
Confirmation that technical originality was always intrinsic to his game comes from Edinho, a defender in Brazil’s 1986 World Cup squad and later the coach of Gremio during Ronaldinho’s early years. ”It’s something that’s a part of him,” he said. ”It’s his nature, to create new things during a game.”
To another Gremio coach, Antonio Lopes, Ronaldinho’s play was always ”a mix of art and objectivity. When I managed him, one of the things that impressed me most was that he never wasted a dribble. He could make tricks and pass defenders while trying to score a goal, all at the same time.”
For Silvinho, one of Ronaldinho’s half-dozen fellow Brazilians at Nou Camp, there has been the chance to observe the genius from a different perspective. Operating at left-back (where he alternates with another former Arsenal man, Giovanni van Bronckhorst), Silvinho has grown accustomed to collaborating with a right-footed player stationed in front of him in the position that Frank Rijkaard, Barcelona’s coach, selected for his No 10, knowing that while Ronaldinho is capable of beating a defender on the outside, he is at his most dangerous when he cuts in from the left and works with his stronger foot.
”He’s so smart, so intelligent, that sometimes it’s difficult to read his mind,” Silvinho said. ”And sometimes you give the ball to him, you pass the ball, and you think, ‘Oh, it’s difficult for him to give the ball back to me,’ but he can do it. Mostly it’s easy because he likes to receive the ball and then to try to dribble or shoot or make a cross, so I have the left wing to myself. I just have to make a good run, so that if I get the ball back I can try to give some crosses. He’s amazing. He’s 100% talent. And he’s a powerful player as well, so it’s difficult to stop him.”
John Terry, whom Ronaldinho bundled over on his way to scoring Barcelona’s goal in the second leg of their match against Chelsea at Camp Nou in March, and Gennaro Gattuso, who suffered a similar humiliation in the semifinal a month later, would second that. Slender in build, the Brazilian has a strength belying the cartoonish smile and the marionette-like movements that make him an easy target for Spain’s version of Spitting Image, where he is caricatured as a party-loving beach bunny.
Like all good caricatures, it contains an element of truth. After the 2-0 victory over Espanyol, Ronaldinho reappeared for the celebrations on the pitch with a stud in his left earlobe bearing the initial R and the No 10 spelled out in diamonds. Later he disappeared into the night with his entourage in a giant black Hummer, heading for a party at his home by the beach in Castelldefels, south of Barcelona, where he lives with his mother, Dona Miguelina, and his sister, Deisi.
The south — whether of Barcelona or Brazil — is where Ronaldinho’s soul belongs, which is why it was hard to imagine him accepting Alex Ferguson’s invitation to join Manchester United when he left Paris Saint-Germain, his first European club, in 2003. During this month’s championship celebrations, he had a simple message for Barcelona’s supporters: ”I don’t want this to end.”
Others have memories of a time when he was not so settled, and when partying became a distraction. Luis Fernandez, a member of the great France midfield quartet of the 1980s, was his manager at PSG, where Ronaldinho arrived in the summer of 2001.
”He was very young when he came to Paris,” Fernandez said. ”He wanted to learn, he wanted to work, he wanted to make progress. He came with his family, with his brother and his mother, and the first year went very well because he accepted that he had to work if he was going to develop. The second year was different because in the meantime he’d become the champion of the world. That can make a difference to the head of a player. You understand? He was still young but now he thought he knew everything.”
Fernandez dropped him, recalled him, watched him miss a few penalties, and listened to the whistles of the crowd in the Parc des Princes. Some blamed the player, others the coach. Those who had known him in Brazil thought they were watching a great talent going to waste.
The coach said: ”At Barcelona, where he’s surrounded by great players, he works hard again.”
So hard that last year his salary, originally set at about £2,3-million a year, was more than doubled, bringing him up to parity with Real Madrid’s galacticos and recognising his crucial role in Barcelona’s successful championship bid.
And in November, when Barcelona went to the Bernabeu and beat Real Madrid 3-0, he received a historic ovation from the home fans, who could not help but succumb to his manifest brilliance.
”When I first played with him,” said Mauro Galvao, a former Gremio teammate, ”he could do unexpected things and he was always trying new tricks, but he lacked an instinct for goal. Now he’s a mature player. And he’s found the right place to be.” – Â