George Best called it the most exciting debut he had ever seen.
There had been other high points in recent Manchester United memory: Paul Scholes scoring both goals against Port Vale in United’s League Cup win in September 1994, Ruud van Nistelrooy’s brace against Fulham in his first full League game in August 2001. But eighteen-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo’s debut at Old Trafford on 16 August 2003 in a Premier League match against Bolton Wanderers was certainly an event most of those watching would not easily forget.
A few old veterans at the game compared him to Best. ‘There have been a few players described as “the new George Best” over the years, but this is the first time it’s been a compliment to me,’ replied the legend.
In the sixty-sixth minute, Alex Ferguson substituted Ronaldo on for Nicky Butt. The new arrival made an instant impact, dancing around defenders, running with the ball and showing off an athleticism and skill that forced his teammates to raise their game. As Best noted, Ronaldo showed he was genuinely two-footed; beating players with ease and putting in dangerous crosses with his left or right. ‘Another thing I liked about Ronaldo against Bolton was how he dealt with the physical side. As soon as he came on, he was clattered from behind but he just got up and got on with the game, it didn’t faze him at all,’ Best commented.1
Ryan Giggs later remembered Ronaldo coming on for the last half-hour of the Bolton game and ‘dazzling a tired defence with a brilliant display of pace and skill’. It was that, allied to the physique – ‘he looked more twenty-eight than eighteen,’ Giggs recalled, ‘he was tall and strong and very impressive to look at’ – which mattered.2
Ronaldo had been given United’s legendary number 7 shirt, previously worn by George Best, Eric Cantona and David Beckham, among others. The fans saw elements of all three flashing before them – his dribbling, speed and feints (Best), his vision and range of passing (Beckham), his self-confidence verging on arrogance and sheer flamboyance (Cantona). United executives saw a celebrity in the making, with his good looks combining with his talent to make him an exciting marketing tool, and thus a good replacement for Beckham. As long as Ferguson believed in him.
There were, of course, other characteristics on show which suggested more than a touch of narcissism in Cristiano’s personality, something that would not always fit in a place like Manchester, yet still he impressed. As Paddy Harverson, a life-long United supporter who was the club’s head of communications at the time, recalled of his appearance in the Bolton game: ‘He had that stupid haircut with funny things in his hair, and lots of spots, but he showed immediate courage on the ball, demanded it time and time again, and every time he was fouled, he just got up again. He was unbelievably brave and the fans fell in love with him instantly. He demonstrated in a very short space of time, in just a few minutes, that he was a Manchester United player. Not everyone does that.’3
The new United signing drew a standing ovation from the 70,000 fans that packed Old Trafford that day, but he could have been jostling for a wing berth with an emerging talent elsewhere. Different pieces in the complex puzzle of the international transfer market had only just been fitted into place. David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Carlos Queiroz (United’s assistant manager was about to replace Vicente del Bosque as manager at Real Madrid), Alex Ferguson and Jorge Mendes, as well as three major clubs, Manchester United, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, were all very much part of the manoeuvring and calculation that would have a major impact on the business of football in the years ahead.
It’s worth recording here that protracted transfer negotiations over Ronaldo during the spring and early summer of 2003 had involved, at one stage, FC Barcelona: ‘Mendes offered us Cristiano and Nani as part of a package, €18 million each,’ recalled Alfonso Godall, a senior Barça executive. ‘By that time we had bought Ronaldinho and didn’t have all that much spare cash, but we were looking to find it when Mendes closed the deal with Man United.’
Imagine Messi playing alongside Ronaldo. Awesome possibilities never realized form part of FC Barcelona’s history, as when the club could have had Di Stéfano playing alongside Kubala, but lost the former to Real Madrid, but the ‘what if’ of Ronaldo playing alongside Messi brings into sharp relief just how ingrained their roles as footballing yin and yang have become. Can you imagine one passing to the other, the two of them celebrating a goal together? It’s impossible to tell what might have been had Ronaldo moved to the Nou Camp – perhaps the two players would have inhibited each other’s development rather than thriving together. In any case, while Leo continued his careful development at Barcelona, eighteen-year-old Cristiano set about building on his impressive debut.
Ronaldo’s star had risen in the small Portuguese League but, without the security and family environment that Barcelona had provided Messi with, he was transferred to a foreign country where they spoke no Portuguese and the weather was cold and damp for most of the year. Not Lisbon, let alone semi-tropical Madeira.
Ronaldo had a lot to prove in the tough, competitive English Premier League, not least at a club like United, one of the giant names of global club football, with a huge tradition and history made up of legendary players, many of them homegrown and moulded in youth teams; much like FC Barcelona, but without the politics.
The only Portuguese to have made much impact on United’s history before Ronaldo arrived was the great Eusébio, and he only by virtue of being part of the Benfica side that Best, Charlton, Law et al. had defeated to win United’s first European Cup in 1968. When Ronaldo was transferred to United, he was an unknown quantity to many local fans, and few could have guessed his burning ambition to claim Eusébio’s crown as Portugal’s greatest ever player, and much more besides. He carried the weight of history on his shoulders, both footballing history and his own past, but they already seemed broad enough to bear the burden. At Manchester United, he could also draw inspiration – on the pitch and off it – from the two number 7s who had preceded him.
During the 1990s, United had regained their reputation for entertaining, swashbuckling football with the arrival of the Frenchman Eric Cantona, a controversial but hugely skilled operator. Cantona had a fierce temper, and sometimes showed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for winning the ball back. But he earned the respect of his teammates for his talent on the field – his deadly finishing, control of the ball and creative passing could turn a game round in an instant. His charismatic leadership inspired an emerging generation of young thoroughbreds, who got used to the idea of being the best and winning.
The flamboyant Frenchman was responsible for many things during his time at United: he broke the team’s sense of insularity; he also taught them a thing or two about the power of the media and sponsors, and the way that marketing could be exploited. In commercial terms, he set an example which David Beckham and, after him, Cristiano Ronaldo followed.
After joining the club aged fourteen, Beckham made his debut appearance for Manchester United in 1995, aged nineteen, when the club was well into its revival under Ferguson and Cantona was in his pomp.
Beckham was conscious from his early days at Manchester United of having joined one of the most famous and exciting clubs in the world, where all the players involved, whatever their age, were made to feel part of the family as long as they remained subject to Ferguson’s regime. The manager retained the Calvinist work ethic of the Glasgow shipyards, arriving at his office at 7.30 each morning and overseeing every aspect of how the club was run.
Beckham won promotion to the first team in a hugely competitive environment where the disciplinarian and driven Ferguson regime required full commitment, best performance and results. There was a theory, which every player found himself confronting one day, that after leaving Ferguson’s Old Trafford there was only one way to go, and that was down. (Ronaldo was to prove that wrong, of course. His arrival at Old Trafford was a breakthrough in his career and his years there were formative. His eventual departure, far from being the end of the road, represented a giant step to superstardom.)
Beckham’s departure from the club followed the breakdown of his relationship with Ferguson, a process that had begun with his marriage and reached a controversial climax in his final season, with a much publicized dressing-room bust-up that left Beckham with a cut above the eye, inflicted by a flying boot. By then, Beckham was a marketing machine. As Ellis Cashmore has written in his analysis of Beckham as a cultural phenomenon, his marriage turned the football star into an all-purpose celebrity: ‘The synergy produced in the fusion of two performers, each drawn from different spheres of entertainment, created new and perhaps undreamed of possibilities in marketing, merchandising and promotions in sport, pop, fashion, and eventually patriotism.’4
All of this jarred with Ferguson, of course, and precipitated the player’s departure to Real Madrid. In more ways than one, Beckham paved the way for Ronaldo.
In his autobiography, Alex Ferguson devotes an unusually unqualified section of praise to Cristiano Ronaldo. Even after he had left for Real Madrid, Ferguson looks back at the Madeiran’s time in Manchester with pride and gratitude, for it coincided with the manager’s most successful period of his final years before retirement. In a book that settles scores with many of his starring players who left, it is noticeable that Ferguson acknowledges how mutual their relationship was. He describes how necessary the ‘special talent’ was at that point in their history which he describes as a ‘lean spell’ in the middle of the decade:
‘We helped Ronaldo to be the player he was and he helped us recapture the excitement and self-expression of Manchester United teams.’5
Ferguson played a key role in helping Ronaldo settle in Manchester and mature while he was there. While over the years he had been a paternal figure for young British and Irish players coming up through the youth teams, he knew enough about overseas players at other clubs to know they did not always easily adapt to English weather, humour and general lifestyle. He was also well briefed enough on the particularities of Ronaldo’s family background to realize that the first Portuguese player ever to sign up for Manchester United might struggle with his first experience of living in a foreign land, and needed sensitive handling, not least because of his young, impressionable age.
Around the time of the move to Manchester, visits to Madeira had brought childhood traumas back to haunt Cristiano Ronaldo. It was the vox populi among family friends, and in the neighbourhood where he had been brought up, that his father Dinis’s drinking problem was getting completely beyond his or anybody else’s capacity to control.
Dinis couldn’t stop drinking. His periods of sobriety over the years had become less frequent and briefer, and always with a psychosis commonly felt by unreformed addicts – he was engulfed by the tide of the overpowering necessity to drink. He had panic attacks and thought that he would die if he didn’t get that drink inside him.
Word had also reached the English media that there was a lurking scandal inside the new United signing’s family, with echoes of the most notorious football-related struggles with alcohol immortalized by Best, Adams and Gascoigne. Soon after Cristiano arrived in Manchester, a leading tabloid dispatched a photographer to Madeira with the sole purpose of trying to snap Dinis Aveiro out of his mind, on one of his drunken binges. Word reached a family friend soon after the photographer alerted a local journalist to his assignment, and Dinis was kept under wraps for several days, until the photographer, on this occasion, left the islands seemingly empty handed – at any rate, no embarrassing pictures emerged.
With his father’s mental and physical health deteriorating after years of alcoholism, Ronaldo used part of his increased wealth to fund a new house in Madeira, in an attempt to help Dinis and reconcile his parents. ‘Ever since I was a boy, I had a dream: to build a large house for me, for my family and also for my friends; a space that is not just a house but rather a home, where I can feel really comfortable,’ Cristiano later recalled.6
Ronaldo’s insecurity, masquerading as a need for privacy together with an obsession with family, was rooted in the memory of his parents’ separation and the need he felt to overcome the sadness of his childhood. Dinis moved into the lavish new house with one of his daughters, but within weeks he had been hospitalized in Funchal suffering from liver and kidney problems. The new-found family wealth seemed to have had little impact on his alcoholism, but it did provide Cristiano’s brother, Hugo, with an opportunity to break the cycle of his own substance abuse problems.
As the firstborn of his siblings, Hugo’s early years had coincided with Dinis’s military service in Africa, and his adolescent years with his father’s growing alcoholism. Without the talent at football of his younger brother, Hugo stayed in Madeira, left school early and fell into a life of addiction – drugs and alcohol. Hugo started using hard drugs in the late 1990s, when Cristiano was fourteen and already embarking on a football career with Sporting Lisbon. His mother Dolores realized that Hugo needed help and took out a loan in order to send him to a specialist clinic for treatment. But Hugo failed to stay clean and, two years later, he needed a second course of treatment. Cristiano, by then earning more, helped pay for it.
After Ronaldo moved to Manchester and was joined by his mother there, Hugo gave up his job as a painter and decorator to work as his brother’s aide, dividing his time between Madeira and England.
Having his family around him, a set-up encouraged by Ferguson, helped Cristiano to settle in to life in Manchester. Dolores was first to move into the spacious and comfortable home the club had rented for Ronaldo – a converted farmhouse in Alderley Edge, the quiet village near Manchester popular with players. The neighbourhood had fashionable shops and eateries on the edge of picturesque Lancastrian countryside, and easy access to both the club’s training ground and the city centre.
Dolores was not entirely happy there, missing her friends and the warmth and exuberant vegetation of Madeira. However, she stuck it out for three years, during which time she saw her son adapting to and absorbing life at Manchester United, not because he felt he carried the club in his DNA – which he didn’t – but because he was driven by an ambition to be the best player ever, and because Jorge Mendes had convinced him that this was the best club to be at that stage in his career.
‘Ronaldo was not born a Manchester United fan like, say, Beckham was. He saw United as a platform to develop his enormous talent,’ said Paddy Harverson.
The vanity of CR7 – as Mendes’s agency would soon begin to brand Cristiano Ronaldo – was evident from early on in his time at United, largely because he spent so much time in front of the mirror. In the dressing room, teammates would tease him about it. ‘He always hogged the mirror in the changing room, and some of the other players – Scholes, Giggs, Ferdinand – would get involved in a lot of piss-taking,’ Paddy Harverson recalled. ‘It might have cowed a lesser individual at that age, but he was street smart. He was not intellectually gifted or academic but he was a bright guy who knew from early on, instinctively, how to adapt to the English dressing-room culture – and that, from a kid from Madeira who arrived without speaking English but fitted in, was quite an achievement.’
Many children of alcoholics have fallen under an addictive parent’s shadow, developing similar personality traits and addictions, but not all, by any means. Many, having lived with years of secrecy and shame, consciously try and lead very different lives. Ronaldo was a virtual teetotaller, recognizing the negative impact Dinis had had on his brother Hugo, and fearing that he too carried a potential demon in his blood and that even a drink or two might set him off on the road to perdition.
The self-confidence he displayed in his early appearances at Old Trafford showed him to be a natural leader and a potential superstar on the pitch. His inspiring runs, effortless step-overs, expertly timed passing and powerful strikes at goal all caught the eye on the training ground and on the pitch.
Largely unknown when he arrived, and preceded by some of the greats of English football, the first challenge he faced was to win over the demanding and in many cases sceptical United fans. But then, as Ferguson remarked, ‘Old Trafford had a tradition of building up heroes quickly.’7 Ronaldo’s evident talent and idiosyncratic personality had an immediate impact on fans and in the dressing room.
His relatively sober, self-possessed lifestyle was one aspect of his personality that actually created a certain distance between him and some of his British teammates in those early months. The other was the closely related evidence of his narcissism, which was out of step with the club’s team ethos and which challenged the macho culture that had long prevailed in English football.
The young Cristiano, from his early days in Manchester, had a personality that grated with some teammates and broad sections of the media, because it was seen to be different from the norm in its seeming grandiose sense of self-importance, entitlement and arrogance. As Ferguson later recalled, in the early days at Manchester United, Ronaldo ‘showboated a lot, on field as well as off it . . . There is no doubt that he acted a bit. His earliest lessons were in a theatrical footballing culture.’8 The Leicester City striker James Scowcroft tells of how his manager Micky Adams told him to try a ‘welcome to England’ challenge on Ronaldo: ‘I did what he asked, but he was twenty yards away before I’d finished the tackle.’9
Manchester United’s history was hardly short of showmen, but players became legends because of what they delivered, not the way they acted. Ronaldo’s self-belief from his early days at Manchester was extraordinary, but it would take time for his performances to keep pace with the posturing. The opening months of the season began to suggest a player who was the worst thing a foreign import could be: all mouth and no trousers. In the first instance, though, it was to be his passion, rather than his skills, that began to turn the tide.
It was a turbulent first few months of the new season for United, as they defended their latest League crown in the midst of relentless controversy on and off the field; not least of all, the latest episode of what some commentators had dubbed the enduring soap opera of their rivalry with Arsenal.
This acrimonious and protracted rivalry had been intensifying since the formation of the Premier League in 1992, since when, all but one League title had been won by one or the other team (the exception being Blackburn Rovers’ successful title bid in 1994–5).
In its collective talent and sheer competiveness, as well as its indiscipline and occasional thuggery, the rivalry surpassed anything that the young Madeiran had experienced while at Sporting, even if his childhood and adolescence had had its rougher edges beyond the field of play.
The latest fractious and perhaps most brutal encounter between the two teams had taken place on 21 September 2003, with Ronaldo very much a part of it. It was dubbed the ‘Battle of Old Trafford’ by the press. Arsenal’s captain, Patrick Viera, was sent off for two bookings, the second for a challenge on Ruud van Nistelrooy which the Dutchman made a large meal of.
When the Dutchman then failed to convert a disputed penalty kick just before the final whistle, all hell broke loose. Van Nistelrooy was jostled and taunted by several Arsenal players, and a fight soon broke out. Despite being a relative novice when it came to understanding the idiosyncratic culture of English football, Ronaldo was one of the first United players to throw himself into the punch-up, ostensibly in support of his Dutch colleague. The youngest player on the pitch at eighteen, Ronaldo’s reaction surprised some United fans, who – up to that point – had seen him as a bit soft for the English game. But this was the kind of dust-up Ronaldo had experienced as a young teenager in the backstreets of Funchal and Lisbon.
Now, at Old Trafford, getting his hands dirty on behalf of a teammate earned him respect in the dressing room and from the terraces. Once it was all over, it was the Arsenal combatants who incurred the heaviest punishments arising from the ‘battle’: a three-match ban and £20,000 imposed on Martin Keown, and further fines, totalling £275,000, and bans totalling nine games imposed on Lauren, Ray Parlour, Patrick Vieira and Ashley Cole. Identified as the main United culprits, Ronaldo and Ryan Giggs were also found guilty of misconduct by the FA, but received much lighter fines of £4,000 and £7,500 respectively, and escaped bans.
Although Arsène Wenger at one point protested that his players were the victims of ‘trial by Sky [TV]’, by general consensus it was Arsenal who deserved unqualified criticism, and Ronaldo emerged with his reputation untarnished. As journalist Henry Winter put it: ‘Arsenal may have worn yellow yesterday but they were tainted with red. The face of the beautiful game was ravaged with scars and tears.’10
Ronaldo would not always be thus exonerated of blame. During that first season at United he tended to over-elaborate on the ball and exaggerate his falls when challenged. Ferguson recalled a slightly hysterical edge to Ronaldo’s amateur dramatics in early training sessions at Carrington, when he had a habit of letting out a terrible screech whenever he was tackled, which was often. But the response of those around him helped him adapt and improve.
‘The players would give him pelters. He soon learnt not to make that kind of racket,’ Ferguson remembered. ‘His intelligence helped. He was a smart boy. Once he realized the players would not be a willing audience for his screaming and amateur dramatics in training, he stopped. Over time it erased itself from his game.’11
His theatricality was in no small measure a response to his burning desire to be noticed, the need some naturally gifted players have to show off their talent, but he was determined to get to a point when what he showed off was of such brilliance that everyone who watched him would be in awe of his talent.
But, as he was advised by Carlos Queiroz in his native Portuguese, the onus was also on him to apply his talent. ‘You’re only a great player when people outside the club start recognizing you as such. It’s not enough to be a great player to us at Manchester United,’ Queiroz told him before departing for Madrid to join David Beckham. ‘When you start delivering the passes, delivering the crosses at the right time, people won’t be able to read you. That’s when the great players emerge.’12
In that infamous match against Arsenal, which ended in a goalless draw, just weeks into his first season, you see Ronaldo in part as a victim of Wenger’s defensive tactics, with his opponents reading him and knowing when and how to interrupt his runs. But critics who accused him of falling over too easily also failed to recognize the extraordinary speed with which the tall teenager moved on as well as off the ball, and his body’s natural susceptibility to losing its balance at the slightest contact. Footage from that first season suggests there was no single match in which he played where he didn’t make some significant contribution. On 1 November 2003, ten games into his first season at Manchester United, Cristiano Ronaldo finally opened his account in the Premier League. With only fifteen minutes of the game at home against Portsmouth left, Ronaldo replaced the Uruguayan international Diego Forlán, and five minutes later he took what would come to be seen as one of his trademark free kicks – curling it at an angle from the left, over the wall and into the net.
He finished his opening season with an impressive eight goals in thirty-nine appearances and, watching back over those performances, now you can see the stirrings of those characteristics that will become iconic. That particular high angle of his feet as he cuts in from the right against Tottenham, before pinging a drive off the inside of the far post, the long hang of the leap for his headed goal against Birmingham, the sheer vicious power of his goal against Aston Villa; like the loosely gelled hair, it feels not quite under the full Ronaldo control yet.
The season ended with him wearing a new pair of golden boots against second-tier Millwall in an exciting FA Cup final in Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. Manchester United won 3–0. Cristiano opened the scoring. For all the obvious flashiness, Ronaldo showed in this match how far he had matured as a player since he had arrived in the Premier League, and what a key component of the Ferguson project he had become.
The FA Cup has a history of top clubs being beaten by smaller ones, often because star players find it difficult to feel incentivized either by the contest or the tournament itself – but this was not such an occasion. Manchester United worked hard and showed imagination to win their eleventh FA Cup, their effort personified in Ronaldo, whose evident exhilaration and enjoyment at playing in an FA Cup final was contagious.
Just before the interval, nineteen-year-old Ronaldo danced in front of Millwall’s combative player-manager, thirty-seven-year-old Dennis Wise, to nod Gary Neville’s searching cross down and in. The eighteen-year age gap between the young predator and the veteran midfielder showed in Ronaldo’s mental sharpness and physical grace in front of goal, contrasting with Wise’s somewhat predictable and plodding physicality in defence. It was symptomatic of a match in which, as Ferguson acknowledged, Ronaldo demonstrated that his individualistic repertoire had a richer seam than simply the obsessive step-over of his early days in a United shirt, including a rabona cross with his right foot that made the commentators laugh with incredulity.
While van Nistelrooy collected the man-of-the-match award for scoring the other two goals, Ronaldo would have been a more deserving winner in the view of some commentators, like the Guardian’s Kevin McCarra, who described how at home he seemed in the game, how he ‘luxuriated in the occasion’.13
‘Cristiano was particularly outstanding,’ commented Gary Neville. ‘I think Ronaldo can be one of the top footballers of the world.’14
Ferguson was especially pleased, saying that Ronaldo had cut out the ‘bit of the Portuguese thing’ about him and was now developing really well.
During his first season at Manchester United, Ronaldo had surpassed all expectations as a player, showing extraordinary talent as well as a rapidly growing maturity on the pitch, and picked up his first trophy. His contribution to the team’s success was recognized in him being named the Sir Matt Busby Player of the Year, a trophy awarded by the club’s fans.
To cap it all, he’d been selected for Portugal’s Euro 2004 squad, the nation’s first home tournament.