The boy, according to the astrological profile, is born destined to defy and overcome the handicap of his immediate circumstances . . .
He likes to be alone, and values his independence more than anything, but can also enjoy being the centre of attention, which will lead others to suspect him of arrogance. In fairness he is an honest guy, if occasionally temperamental.
On 5 February 1985, Dolores Aveiro, a thirty-year-old, long-suffering wife and hard-working mother of three children – a boy and two girls – gave birth to her second son.
In her memoir, published in Portuguese in 2015 under the title Mother Courage: The Life, Strength, and Faith of a Fighter, Dolores tells a Dickensian story of her early life. She was born in 1954 in the fishing village of Caniçal, on the Atlantic island of Madeira. She was brought up in an orphanage after her mother died and her father abandoned her. In her early adult years, she suffered and survived poverty, domestic violence and cancer.
Aged eighteen she married Dinis, and had three children – Hugo, Elam and Katia – during her first four years of marriage. Then she fell pregnant for the fourth time. She went to see a doctor to ask whether she could terminate the pregnancy, but he advised strongly against it. Abortion was illegal in Portugal at the time.
Dolores emerged from her consultation deeply depressed. A neighbour told her about a recipe that might just help her abort without seeking medical help. It involved drinking boiling black beer and running until fainting. After considering the ‘remedy’, Dolores’s Catholic upbringing and the doctor’s advice about the medical and legal risk she would be taking won out.
Cristiano Ronaldo Aveiro was born at 10.20 a.m. in the Cruz de Carvalho hospital in Funchal, the coastal capital of Madeira. Weighing four kilos and measuring fifty-two centimetres, he was above average in size. ‘With that size he will grow up to be a footballer,’ the gynaecologist told Dolores.
On both his mother and father’s side, Ronaldo was descended from islanders of Portuguese stock. A paternal great-grandmother, Isabel Risa Piedade, had been born in Praia, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa.
The Aveiro marriage was defined by the fact that Dinis had been an alcoholic since before Ronaldo was born, and was slowly killing himself while struggling to hold down any kind of job. This is turn meant that Dolores had to spend long periods working away from her children. In her absence, the youngest of the siblings, Cristiano, was looked after by his elder sister, Katia. She took him to school and brought him home at the end of lessons, and helped him with his homework.
The names that Cristiano Ronaldo’s mother chose for him tell their own story: the first is an acknowledgement of her Catholic faith, the second is in deference to President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, a blue-collar boy from Illinois, had worked as a sports commentator and actor before his meteoric rise in union politics saw him elected as governor of California. He then went on to become the most powerful man in the world.
In January 1985, Reagan had been sworn in for his second term as president after winning a landslide, and was well on his way to making more history by contributing to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Deep down, Dolores Aveiro longed for a fairytale rags-to-riches story of her own, one that would transform the misery of her marital life into something worthwhile.
On 25 April 1974, Dolores Aveiro was away working in France when Portugal liberated itself from decades of right-wing dictatorship, thanks to a Communist-supported, populist and largely bloodless military coup. It was popularly called the Revolution of the Carnations, given that its enduring image was that of soldiers with these flowers in the barrels of their guns, placed there by supportive civilians.
By 1985, the year of Ronaldo’s birth, the power of the pro-Soviet Portuguese Communist Party, and radical leftism generally, had dissipated in the country. As part of its bid, together with post-Franco Spain, to join the European Union, Portugal had become a politically moderate state.
Madeira, which traditionally had been more conservative than the mainland owing to its dominance by absentee landlords and foreign – mainly British – business interests, had become locally governed by centre-right and traditionally Catholic politicians, led by those in the anti-Communist Social Democratic Party (PSD).
Revolutionary pledges of a Portugal where poverty would be eradicated and all men and women become as they were born – equal – had proved illusory, and with it disappeared Dolores’s hope that the Aveiro family might emulate Ronaldo Reagan and reach the height of presidential power one day.
However, in a twist of fate, it was now that the destiny of Dolores Aveiro’s fourth-born became sealed, thanks to the decision of his often absent father to make his friend, Fernando Sousa, the young boy’s godfather. In 1985, Sousa was the captain of the local football club, Andorinha, where Dinis worked as an unofficial kit man, when not struggling to put in some hours as a municipal gardener close to the neighbourhood’s main bar.
In contrast to his friend Dinis, Sousa was in good health and was content in his part-time amateur sporting role. Indeed, the two men’s differing dispositions could be traced back to another twist of fate. Fernando had been saved from an experience that had proved traumatic for Dinis – a story I explored when I visited Madeira for the second time in 2016. It is to this story that I now turn, for without it one cannot begin to understand the redemptive nature of the life of Cristiano Ronaldo.
Late one afternoon in November 2016, I found myself being driven up a steep hill to a quiet and modest residential neighbourhood in Funchal. My destination was not far from Quinta de Falcão – the poor barrio where a former shantytown had been transformed into social housing units made of unpainted brick and wood. It was there that Cristiano Ronaldo had spent his childhood, in a three-roomed bungalow.
My guide was João Marquês de Freitas, a retired public prosecutor and influential fan and member of Sporting Clube de Portugal, often known in the UK as Sporting Lisbon. This institution would, of course, be where Ronaldo began his professional career.
For now, de Freitas’s contribution to our story was in his service as an army colonel during the early 1970s, in the last days of Portugal’s colonial presence in Africa – a protracted effort to hang on to its colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea, after armed independence movements had gathered pace in the 1960s.
As with many former colonial powers, the Portuguese have belatedly come to terms with the truth about those wars, but an enduring reticence about debating or examining the bad old days contributed to the neglect of the country’s war veterans. As Barry Hatton, author of The Portuguese, writes: ‘About 9,000 soldiers were killed and at least 12,000 wounded on the African battlefield. Like many armies, they were cheered when they left but forgotten when they returned.’1
I was thinking on this when my friend de Freitas volunteered to introduce me to former army colleagues in a war veterans’ club. The club was located in a converted nineteenth-century ammunitions depot overlooking the bay of Funchal. The round building of thick stone and the surrounding land had the atmosphere less of an arms dump than a surreal Latin American hacienda – the kind one expected Zorro to jump in and out of, or a modern-day drug trafficker to hide in.
Inside the main building was a large, simply decorated room overhung with wooden beams, its walls covered with scenes of heroic military exploits. It had been renovated, like so many other areas of Madeira, with generous EU funds, and was a belated government response to the needs of thousands of veterans who had survived the military campaign but returned to civilian life either physically injured or psychologically damaged, or both, but who had been forgotten by society as a whole.
Those who fought in Portugal’s colonial wars were destined, like the Americans who fought in Southeast Asia before them, to suffer long after they had ceased fighting because of poor medical and psychological support.
‘Being in the war meant narrowly escaping death after seeing one’s comrade in arms shot or blown up, or killing another human being because he was the enemy. Coming back, for some, was to feel abandoned by the society they had thought they were defending, and living haunted by nightmares that returned, time and time again, when you least expected them,’ de Freitas told me.
The veterans’ association secretary, retired Lieutenant Colonel Teixeira de Sousa, then pulled out a small index card. ‘Dinis Aveiro,’ he read, ‘Battalion Number 4910, Company number 3. Enlisted July 1974. Angola.’
Surviving veterans and their family members recall the last months of Portugal’s late colonial wars as a horrific experience, made worse by a gradual breakdown of discipline and morale. Gida, a sixty-year-old woman, recounted how her late older brother had served with Dinis Aveiro in Africa. Her brother had told her about the day he had seen four of his closest colleagues blown to bits by mortar shells while they were on patrol: ‘He reacted by dropping his rifle, and running away as fast as he could. He kept running and running until collapsing from exhaustion. He was later found by other Portuguese soldiers. When he returned to the mainland, every time he heard a cork pop, or a piece of cutlery hit a plate, he would dive under the table. He died without recovering from his mental breakdown.’
Other soldiers caught malaria, which left them barely able to move and shaking with bouts of heat and cold as the fever took hold. A generation of students or young working-class Portuguese were drafted into military service, most of them against their will. When not out on patrol or escorting trucks along roads studded with mines, they played cards, listened to rock music and smoked joints of local marijuana.
But most of all, they drank a lot of local beer which, unlike non-alcoholic beverages, was never in short supply. It was also essential drinking, because the local water was prone to be unsanitary and used only to wash and cook.
There is a surviving photograph of Dinis Aveiro from his time in Africa. He is sitting on the engine chassis of a car with his friend Alberto Martins. The thickset Martins, long haired and wearing sunglasses, wears an open, broad-collared shirt and bell-bottom trousers. In contrast, Dinis has short hair and is dressed in military fatigues. With a skinnier frame, he stares at the camera with deeply set eyes, unsmiling, tight-lipped, his torso even tenser than his face.
‘The young soldiers out in Africa began to drink a lot,’ Lieutenant Colonel de Sousa told me. ‘Sometimes out of boredom, but mainly out of fear, as an escape, as a denial of an existence they couldn’t handle. It was in Africa that soldiers became alcoholics. Those who returned to Madeira were particularly prone to addiction because the island – still very poor in the 1970s – had transformed its vineyards for domestic consumption as well as export. When they got back from the war, there was a lot of drink available and not much work.’
‘We were told we were there to keep the peace, but we were caught in the crossfire of rival factions, fire-fighting, trying to put out one fire and having another one blow up in our face,’ recalled another veteran, Fernando Luís, whose brother was in the same company as Dinis Aveiro.
After returning to civilian life, Luís refereed in the local regional football league, and of the days he crossed paths with Cristiano Ronaldo’s father, one endures in his memory more than any other.
It was before a game, and Luís was changing into his referee’s kit in the cramped, poorly equipped changing rooms that Andorinha shared with visitors. They heard a frantic thumping on the door and raucous cries of ‘Let the people in! Everyone wants to watch this match! Let them in!’
It was Dinis Aveiro, blind drunk, as he often was.
Aveiro’s increasingly irrational and tortured behaviour strained his marriage and distanced him from the few friends he had known from childhood, and those he had made prior to and during the war. And while the Andorinha clubhouse became a kind of second home to him for a while, he eventually squandered any respect anyone in the club might have had for him, beyond the fact that some held him indirectly responsible for putting Cristiano Ronaldo on the road to success.
If Ronaldo, in later years, could never bring himself to belittle or diminish his dad, it was because he owed his own motivation and ambition to making up for Dinis’s failings. From a young age, Cristiano set about proving he could not only conquer demons, but draw strength from confronting them.
The tall bell tower of the Church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe looms over the hillside neighbourhood of San Antonio, and the adjacent, poor quarter of Quinta de Falcão, where Cristiano Ronaldo grew up. The church’s most venerated icons are the local St Anthony, the Immaculate Conception, our Lady of Sorrow, the Crucified Christ, and last but by no means least, Cristiano Ronaldo, for he was christened there.
Fernando Sousa, the godfather who was spared the military draft, will never forget the look of despair, verging on anger, on the face of the local parish priest as he and his half-drunk friend Dinis arrived half an hour late for Ronaldo’s baptism. The two men had spent the afternoon some thirty kilometres away at Andorinha’s match against local rival Ribeira Brava – Sousa, of course, played as team captain, while Dinis filled in as kit man when not retiring to the changing rooms for a top-up from his bottle of rough wine.
Many years later, Sousa would try and make light of the fact that he and the baby’s father nearly wrecked the entire ceremony. A less patient priest would have simply declared it null and void. Rather than blame Dinis’s drunkenness, Sousa blamed the bad state of the mountain road they had had to drive along in order to get to Funchal.
‘The match ended a bit later than we thought, we miscalculated the time it would take us. The priest was a patient type, thank God, but, more important, he was an Andorinha fan, so our excuse had his blessing in the end.’
Thus did football define the timing and nature of Cristiano Ronaldo’s admission into the Catholic Church, as well as his destiny. It was there, in that church of white stone and dark timber, as she stood waiting, clutching her latest child in her arms, that Dolores finally came to terms with the fact that she could not depend on her husband for her son’s wellbeing.
I had looked forward to my first meeting with Cristiano Ronaldo’s godfather with some trepidation. Even though the player, in young adulthood, had given control of his career to his agent Jorge Mendes, part of me wondered if Sousa had survived in the family saga as something of an enforcer.
As it turned out, Sousa was no Don Corleone, but rather a genial if slightly bumptious pensioner, who arrived late for our meeting in a small car, blaming his lateness on the fact that the hotel I was staying in would not let him park because he wasn’t a client, even though the owners were business partners of Ronaldo, his godson.
While he talked of having visited Madrid twice in recent years to watch Ronaldo play, Sousa seemed to have long since ceased to have regular contact with him. Nonetheless, he had been a major part of the formative years of his godson’s life – the early years of hardship and family trauma, which never included the word ‘abuse’, but were underpinned by a redemptive gloss which no one on the island of Madeira was prepared to contradict.
‘When you’re born into poverty, a toy, any toy is steeped in magic,’ I wrote in Hand of God, my biography of Diego Maradona,2 who was given his first football aged three by his Uncle Cirilo. The Aveiro home in Quinta de Falcão had no mobile phones, games consoles, tablet computers, voice-recognition puppies or robot kits. But it did have a football, which Sousa gave his godson after he had given him a toy car and he had thrown a tantrum.
From an early age, Ronaldo showed a burning ambition to be the best, even though he knew that the odds were stacked against him, not least because of the remoteness and outsider status of the island where he’d been born.
In that respect, it’s interesting to consider the long shadow cast by Eusébio de Silva Ferreira, the Mozambiquan-born Portuguese national, considered one of the greatest players of the twentieth century. Eusébio, as he became more popularly known, moved from his native Mozambique when it was still a Portuguese colony to Lisbon, where he played for Benfica and Portugal’s national squad. A great inside-forward, Eusébio possessed a staggeringly effective right foot with flowing control and explosive acceleration, and could leave defenders trailing in his wake. He could also dribble and was good in the air. A superb athlete, he was graceful in movement as well as enormously powerful.
Closer to Africa than to the European mainland, and a natural stopoff point for those travelling across the Atlantic, the island of Madeira had always struggled with its identity. As a staging post for trade for centuries, its population became diverse and cosmopolitan for somewhere so remote. Yet that same trade only enriched the few, and the gap between rich and poor on the island has been profound since the seventeenth century. Both foreign settlers and Portuguese landowners built palatial houses with large manicured gardens, filled with exotic plants and flowers, contrasting with the poorer neighbourhoods’ rudimentary huts, or, later, workers’ bungalows and council flats subsidized by the state, such as the one in which Ronaldo’s family lived.
Ronaldo’s success has put the island on the map for new generations, and the pride that the island has in him is not just as a Madeiran but as a Portuguese citizen. He is part of both the island’s and the nation’s sense of self-worth, for Portugal has spent most of her history regarding herself as one of Europe’s underdogs.
As Hatton points out in The Portuguese: ‘A common sentiment among the Portuguese is that the odds are stacked against them, that they are playing a losing game with fate.’ He quotes Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal’s greatest poets, who in 1928 described the nation as ‘slumbering’ since the maritime feats of the glorious Age of Discovery, its fate determined by foreigners, and, in Hatton’s words, ‘doomed to be a B-list country.’3
Fertile ground, then, for someone determined to defy the personal and social circumstances of his upbringing.
In his childhood, Cristiano played his first football games on the unpaved streets near his home, with stones piled up as goalposts, and sometimes only a wall as a teammate. The location of the neighbourhood, on a steep hill, meant that from an early age Cristiano would face arduous walks to school and back. With the strength of his legs and feet and his balance severely tested, he would make his way along rough, narrow paths, with a sheer drop on either side. Cristiano became streetwise and physically resilient.
‘The street gives you cockiness. If you are born in a poor neighbourhood you step out, or they step on you. Cristiano was aware of that from the day he could walk,’ recalled family friend Rui Santos, who was president of Andorinha, Cristiano’s first football club.
There is one ‘official’ family memory that has the young Cristiano following his father – the kit man – as he carried a huge bag of balls around with him, and Sousa giving him one of them, with Dinis’s blessing.
‘Dinis was really proud of his youngest child from the first day he came into the world,’ Sousa told me as we sat drinking coffee in Madeira’s biggest shopping mall, ignored by the passing public. The ‘godfather’ clung onto those childhood memories, for they placed him, for a brief period, at the centre of the life of a future superstar.
‘Cristiano was, in his childhood years, playing for Andorinha, rather like his father; thin, and very agile. Of course he didn’t drink, but he also didn’t eat much and when he played football he was very fast and moody.
‘His dad called him the “little rat”, because of the way he dribbled round the other boys. And Cristiano always wanted to win! He would argue with his teammates and cry if he missed a goal or the team lost.’
Ronaldo played for Andorinha for two years, when he was seven and eight. One of the local kids who played with him, Ricardo Santos, the son of the club president Rui, remembered that Cristiano was not particularly strong and was not the tallest of his group – although he was certainly not the smallest: ‘He was good and could score goals and he always wanted to win, and yes he had a temper and would indeed burst into tears if he lost.’
Ricardo now trains young children, when not managing the clubhouse bar at the all-weather turf grounds Andorinha have built since the days Ronaldo was there. In his day, the local boys had to settle for a rougher, unturfed surface that the club shared with a school. While Ronaldo went on to become a major global sporting icon, Ricardo Santos stayed more or less in the place he had kicked his first football. It was unclear whether his reluctance to talk much about his childhood teammate stemmed from a scarcely repressed resentment at having lost out on the lottery of life, or loyalty to a former teammate.
By contrast, his father Rui is a small dynamo of a man. I met him at the foot of the main staircase in the municipal building of San Antonio Funchal, where he had been elected as the council leader. He asked me to wait while he settled a dispute between two social workers over a room that had been double booked, then took me up to his spartan office.
Rui Santos was only thirteen when the Portuguese Revolution broke out in 1974 – ‘I felt the younger people were happy but the older people not so much’ – so was also spared conscription and the subsequent trauma suffered by Dinis. He befriended Ronaldo’s parents, and at one point offered them both work in his uncle’s artisan wicker factory. He also witnessed at close quarters the deterioration of their marriage as Dinis’s alcohol addiction grew, making it impossible for him to get full-time employment.
Meanwhile, as president, Rui spent many weekends watching Cristiano play his first club games for Andorinha: ‘When he was a kid, his technique set him apart from the others. He learnt step-overs, was fast, and had a hunger for goal, although I would be lying to you if I told you that I knew then what he was destined to become,’ Rui recalled.
But if Cristiano Ronaldo had yet to develop the physique and skills that would turn him into a superstar, it was only a matter of time before someone identified his potential, and that person was his godfather.
Compared to mainland Europe, football as popular pastime took root belatedly in Madeira. One of the island’s more flourishing export businesses, that of wine, was run by well-resourced British families educated in English public schools, who had grown up playing rugby and golf. Unlike their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century compatriots in mainland Iberia and South America, the British in Madeira showed no interest in importing football. Thus football on the island developed more slowly, its following further handicapped by the mountainous terrain and poor communications and infrastructure which left many parts of Madeira isolated.
What it lacked in early foreign influence, however, it made up for with a strong sense of regional identity, underlined by a traditional insularity. The island’s oldest surviving major clubs, Club Sport Marítimo and Nacional, were both founded in 1910, when Madeira felt the aftershock of political upheaval on mainland Portugal. In that year, the monarchy was overthrown and a republic proclaimed, but Portuguese football didn’t keep pace with social change, and was destined for decades of underachievement, not least in Madeira.
When Cristiano Ronaldo was born in 1985, Madeira had little to boast of in football terms. Of the island’s clubs, only Marítimo had managed to win the Portuguese championship, in 1926, and became Madeira’s only permanent presence in the Portuguese League from the early 1970s.
By contrast, Nacional earned an early reputation less for its football than for its cultural eclecticism, spreading its thin resources across a number of locally popular activities like volleyball, hockey and swimming. One of the club’s enduring legends was the athletic and strikingly handsome swimmer José da Silva, known as ‘Saca’, who set new 1,500 and 1,000-metre freestyle national records in the late 1940s, before seeing his popularity increase as a result of his long-distance swims, including a successful crossing of the English Channel.
In Nacional’s official illustrated history, published in 2010 to commemorate the club’s centenary, Saca is one of two club icons given considerable coverage. The other is Cristiano Ronaldo, who played in Nacional’s junior teams for two seasons in the mid-1990s and who, a matter of weeks after signing, found himself taking a central place in the team photograph as captain.
The photograph shows Ronaldo standing stiffly, arms held behind his back like a military cadet and with a more intense, seemingly self-confident look than any of his teammates, from whom he seems aloof. In the image, Ronaldo already seems to define himself as someone who is the leader because he believes he is, and as someone on the road to the top. As he put it in an interview in 2010, recalling those early days at Nacional, ‘I felt that I was different. Why? I don’t know, maybe because I was more ambitious.’
In truth, he might have stayed on the island of Madeira, gradually fading into oblivion, had it not been for his godfather and mother deciding that the club they were fans of, Nacional – rather than its more historically successful and seemingly better-resourced rival Marítimo, which Dinis supported – was the next step up after Andorinha.
The traditional gap between Marítimo and Nacional had been narrowing for years, thanks to science professor turned football manager António Lourenço, who was appointed head of Nacional’s youth development programme in 1978.
Learning from the experience of leading Portuguese mainland clubs like Benfica and Sporting, Lourenço convinced senior executives and other backers to help finance a significant investment in new training techniques, diet and medical assistance. The programme expanded the club’s reach across the island’s school system in a concerted effort to tap the largest pool of available talent, with the ultimate aim of Nacional producing a senior team capable of competing successfully in the upper echelons of the Portuguese leagues.
Thanks to Lourenço, by the early 1990s, when it came to deciding on Cristiano Ronaldo’s next step up, there was little to choose between Marítimo and Nacional, and both clubs were interested. The fact that Dinis was actually a Marítimo fan counted for very little in the decision-making process, perhaps other than reinforcing Dolores’s determination to stick to Nacional, on Fernando Sousa’s advice.
One somewhat farcical version of what happened next has Bernardino Rosa, the head of recruitment at the Marítimo academy, missing an allegedly crucial meeting that had been arranged by Andorinha because of a poorly organized schedule. Nacional’s representative was present, Rosa was not.
But, according to Rui Santos, the president of Andorinha at the time, the move to Nacional was a done deal, with or without the Marítimo meeting going ahead. The key factor was the friendship that Fernando Sousa had with senior officials and staff at Nacional, among them the youth coach António Mendoça, who had been scouting for talent and had expressed his admiration for Cristiano.
When I caught up with Santos more than twenty years later, he remained philosophical about how he had ended up handing over his star player. ‘Nacional just had better resources to develop him as a player and allow him to make that next step,’ he said. In fact, Santos not only had little say in the decision but the move didn’t much matter to him at the time – he claims that no one on the island foresaw the superstar that Ronaldo would eventually become. The ‘deal’ involved a very modest transfer payment in Portuguese escudos, equivalent to about £1,500, and two sets of semi-complete cast-off football kits – shorts, socks and boots, but no shirts, as the clubs’ colours didn’t match.
‘Dolores was the decisive factor,’ Fernando Sousa told me, ‘because she told me she wanted Nacional and she looked to me as the person who had Cristiano’s best interests at heart, and as someone who protected him. That was my duty as a godfather.’
After arriving at Nacional aged ten, Ronaldo showed from early on his potential, playing seven-a-side and later eleven-a-side, often competing against boys from older teams. One youth coach there at the time, Pedro Talinhas, recalled: ‘He was very good technically, he was very good with both feet. His objective was to score beautiful goals. He was fast, great at shooting, he was already powerful.’
His exceptional speed, dribbling and finishing were apparent to the youth coaching staff, but so was his resilience. As Mendoça recalled: ‘Street football had taught him how to avoid being hit, sidestep the opponent and face up to kids much bigger than he was. It had also strengthened his character – he was extremely courageous.’
By eleven years of age, Cristiano was also showing the emotional volatility that would come to be seen as a characteristic of his game. ‘When Nacional was losing, he’d be playing and crying at the same time,’ Talinhas recalled.
According to Talinhas, the player’s ‘troublesome temperament’ included a lack of team spirit. From his early days at Nacional, he showed a tendency, once he had picked up the ball, to run with it and keep running with it, rather than pass it, with only one aim in his head – to score a goal. Coaching staff saw their main challenge as trying to get Ronaldo to see football as a collective sport, where each player, not just him, had a part to play.
At the same time, they recognized that Ronaldo’s self-belief was a fundamental part of his character. It was a response he drew from within himself to the adversity that had haunted him from birth. It was not just that he had learnt to play football on the rough streets, and developed his stamina and physique walking up and down steep slopes. The fact that his father made a habit of turning up to watch him play at Nacional, but seemingly remained disconnected from what he saw, was both an embarrassment and an incentive to play better.
In his analysis of the internal dynamic forces which motivate creativity among iconic figures, the distinguished English psychiatrist Anthony Storr notes how ambition can sustain self-esteem and develop as a motivating force in response to deprivation of parental affection in childhood.
In Cristiano’s case, there seems little doubt that his childhood was overshadowed by the alcoholism of his father, whose condition made him incapable of providing the support and encouragement his talented child craved.
In Ronaldo, the authorized 2015 documentary directed by Anthony Wonke, which was filmed with support of Ronaldo and his agent Jorge Mendes, there are two striking images of Dinis: one a framed photograph of a gaunt, unshaven man with a vacant stare, hung on an otherwise undecorated white wall in Cristiano’s Madrid home; the other a video clip of a similarly wasted figure, looking awkward and disengaged, but managing a smile and a token show of affection towards his son, in a rare glimpse of family life in the early days in Madeira.
The family life that Ronaldo experienced as a child was far from normal. As he himself recalls in that documentary: ‘My father was drunk almost every day. It was very difficult to get to know him. I never had a connection with him. I feel frustrated he wasn’t around more.’4
Cristiano Ronaldo would not only survive but draw strength from early hardships. His self-belief, based on a trust in his talent and hard work, fuelled his desire to seek ‘the recognition and acclaim which accrue from external achievement’. Words written by Anthony Storr about the psyche of Winston Churchill.
Dolores Aveiro likes to tell the story of when Ronaldo fell ill with flu before the final of a regional competition. She wanted him to stay in bed, but he insisted on playing. ‘If I feel too ill, they can always substitute me,’ he told her.5 They never did substitute him. He played and helped the team win the tournament.
At Nacional, Cristiano Ronaldo showed a tendency to argue with his teammates. The other boys put up with it only because he proved a prolific goal scorer, and he became a key element in Nacional’s youth category success, with the team often beating opponents by a margin of nine or ten goals. Cristiano spent two years with the Madeiran club, enhancing his reputation on the island and catching the attention of scouts from the Portuguese mainland.