I wonder if all Brazilian fathers christen their sons with a view to their becoming footballers? They all seem to be called Ronaldinho or Ronaldo or Robinho or something like that, and it can be very confusing. Aren’t any of them called the equivalent of John Smith?
With Ronaldinho it’s even more complicated than usual and you have to concentrate to follow this. He was actually named Ronaldo de Assis Moreira when he was born in south-east Brazil in March 1980. He came to be called Ronaldinho, meaning ‘little Ronaldo’, to avoid confusion with the other Brazilian striker Ronaldo, the ‘fat one’ as Jose Mourinho calls him. (To complicate matters further, the ‘fat’ Ronaldo was also called Ronaldinho at one stage, but let’s not go there.)
Either way, the man who became Ronaldinho – I’m talking now about the thin one with the buck teeth who scored with a free-kick over David Seaman’s head in the World Cup – was bound to be a footballer no matter what name he went under. He’s the one who always plays with a smile on his face. My thinking about that is that it’s an act of nature. With hamsters like he’s got, you can’t help but smile all the time. Inside he could be seething with rage and anger, but he has to keep on smiling – there is nothing he can do about it.
There is this theory that all Brazilians are beautiful. Perhaps Ronaldinho is ‘beautiful on the inside’, what you might call ‘a beautiful person’. That’s what God’s done. He’s said, ‘You are going to be talented – you are going to be a great footballer. The downside is that you’re going to be all that but with a face like Bugs Bunny. Oh yes, and I’m also going to give you a rascal barnet. A bit like Bob Marley meets Harpo Marx.’ He could iron that all day and it would still come out like coiled springs. Despite all that, Ronaldinho hasn’t done too badly. What is really annoying, although I admire him for it, is that he’s had absolute darlings flocking round him for years.
His father, who had played football for a local club, worked in a shipyard and died of a heart attack when Ronaldinho was just eight years old. The family were very poor and his elder brother Roberto signed for the town club Gremio, who provided the family with a house, only for the brother’s career to be cut short by injury.
The little boy was already showing exceptional skills not only at football but also as a futsal player. That’s a kind of indoor football but unlike five-a-side there are no walls or boards to hit the small, less bouncy ball off. It leads to fantastic skill as the game is built around technique, ball control and passing in very tight areas. It encourages the natural skills of the players and it’s popular in Brazil where there’s a lack of full-size pitches for schools to play on.
Ronaldinho’s first taste of football fame came at 13 when a local paper wrote about him after he’d scored every goal in his side’s victory. Well, they did win 23–0. In 1997, he was a star of the World Under-17 Championship in Egypt, which Brazil won. Back home, he made his senior debut for Gremio and soon the talk about him coming to Europe began. His name was linked with Arsenal, which I can believe, and with St Mirren, which somehow doesn’t sound quite right, even though it would have only been for a short spell while he waited to join Paris Saint-Germain. He joined the French club in 2001 and by all accounts he certainly took to the bright lights of Gay Paree.
The club’s coach Luis Fernandez criticised him for the amount of time he spent in the city’s nightclubs and really got the hump when his young star smuggled a girl back into his room at the team hotel the night before a key match. (Top man!) ‘The problem with Roni is that he does not lead the lifestyle of a top sportsman,’ Fernandez said. ‘He has so much ability but that could be his downfall. I don’t have a problem with him. He has a problem with himself. I can control what happens at the training camp, but not outside. Roni is 22 years old but he has to understand that recuperation is important when a player is physically fragile.’
Ronaldinho was reluctant to take French lessons when he arrived, but managed to pick up enough of the lingo to call Fernandez ‘fils d’un putain’ – son of a whore – when he was substituted in one game. In another match he refused to come off when the coach wanted him to.
On another occasion, he was allowed to go home to Brazil for Christmas on the strict instructions that he report back to PSG’s training ground on 28 December. He arrived in his BMW 4x4 on 2 January, wished his team-mates Happy New Year and then went off to make a phone call. Goalkeeper Lionel Letizi insisted he join the other players in the changing room and explain his absence. He did at least come up with an interesting excuse when the club officials asked why he was late back; he told them he’d been having dental treatment! Lucky to get back before Easter then. The club fined him £1,300 and ordered him to follow a rigorous training routine separate from the rest of the team.
Ronaldinho was one of those players who was doing better for his country than for his club, although you’ve got to take into account the men he was alongside. He’s one of the few Brazilians who have played for their country at every level. In 1999, within the space of three months, he both played for Brazil in the World Youth Championships in Nigeria and got his first full cap, against Latvia.
By the time the World Cup finals in Asia came around in the summer of 2002, he was one of the biggest names in a Brazilian side already boasting Ronaldo and Rivaldo. He scored two goals during the finals but the one everyone remembers is that long free-kick in the quarter-final against England – the one that sailed over poor David Seaman’s head early in the second half.
It was a fluke, I’m sure of that. It just sliced off his boot and I don’t fault Dave Seaman at all, even though the cheeky little Brazilian tried to take all the credit for it. ‘My team-mate Cafu had told me that Seaman usually moves forward preparing to take the square balls. I was a bit far out but I tried it and I was able to score. He moved back but couldn’t stop it. I had a shot at goal and I was lucky.’ Bollocks! He shanked it.
Rio Ferdinand met him in the dope-testing room after the game and he agrees with me that it was unintentional. He says he asked him, ‘Was it a cross or a shot? Did you mean that?’
Ronaldinho laughed and indicated a freak goal.
‘He admitted he didn’t mean to shoot,’ Ferdinand said. ‘When he started laughing I knew it was lucky. I don’t care what anyone says, it was not meant to have been a shot.’
For once the smile was wiped off his face when he was shown a straight red card for a lunge at Danny Mills soon after the goal, although he and the rest of the Brazilians said it was unfair. ‘It wasn’t a red-card offence,’ Ronaldinho said. ‘Mills himself, who suffered the foul, told me this and everybody in the stadium saw it.’
His team-mate, ex-Middlesbrough star Juninho, added his tuppence-worth: ‘He is not the sort of player who goes out to intentionally hurt somebody. The referee didn’t know what sort of person he was so he sent him off. It was a mistake.’
It doesn’t matter what sort of character you are – a foul’s a foul.
It’s a wonder that he had any energy for football, mind you, given the stories that emerged about his training. A lap-dancer he met in a Paris nightclub said he played a type of keepie-uppie with her for eight hours and was ‘like a pneumatic drill’. A 23-year-old business consultant he met in Malaysia (where the squad were preparing for the finals) tried to get his autograph and ended up having a similar early-morning session. No wonder he once came second in a list of soccer playboys, behind George Best but way ahead of third-placed Sven-Goran Eriksson.
He even said, ‘I know people are saying they want me to wear Beckham’s number seven shirt. I know I do not have his looks but I hope my football is beautiful on the pitch and that is what I enjoy. I am like many men. I love being with women and that sometimes gets you into trouble, but I am a young person who enjoys life. But football is my focus now and I enjoy playing more than anything else, so playing for Brazil and my club will always come first.’
None of it seemed to slow him down, and, although he missed the semi-final against Turkey, he was back for the final against Germany. For once he wasn’t the star of the show – a back-to-form Ronaldo (that’s the ‘fat one’) scored twice to beat the Germans – and then he too started to go on about sex, saying it wasn’t as good as the World Cup. ‘Both are very hard to stay without and I am sure that sex would not be so rewarding as the World Cup. Sex, I am going to do in a few moments, but nothing can be so rewarding as the World Cup. Not that sex is not good, but, you see, a World Cup is every four years, sex is not.’
I don’t know what they put in the coffee in Brazil, but I wouldn’t mind some.
By this stage, Ronaldinho was dissatisfied with PSG for failing to make an impact in Europe, so it came as no surprise when he was transferred a year after the World Cup. The shock was that Manchester United, who appeared to be favourites for his signature, lost out to Barcelona’s £21 million bid. Just to rub it in, he said his choice was prompted by the Spanish club’s rich tradition of having great players such as Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff and the Brazilians Romario, Ronaldo and Rivaldo on their books at one time or another. ‘Many of the players who have passed through here are part of the history of football. I chose Barcelona because it has everything a player [and playboy] could wish for or need. It’s a great club.’
Barcelona had been in decline for a few years. They had won La Liga six times in the 1990s, but those glory days had finished. They’d finished the previous season in sixth place and they needed a new figurehead. Thirty thousand supporters turned out to greet him and see him hold aloft the number ten shirt he would be wearing. ‘There are a lot of top-quality players here and I feel privileged to be part of the Barcelona squad,’ he told them.
It was at Barcelona during the next five years that he confirmed his status as a truly great player. In his first season, he scored 15 goals as Barça moved up to finish second in La Liga and in December 2004 he was named by FIFA as Best Footballer in the World. That was soon followed by another Best World Player award, this time based on the votes of 40,000 professional footballers worldwide.
Six months later, Ronaldinho helped Barcelona win La Liga 2005 easily, ahead of Real Madrid; he also picked up the Ballon D’Or for being European Footballer of the Year.
Barça won the Spanish title again the next season but more importantly they also won the Champions League after a 14-year wait. Wealthy Chelsea were beaten on the way there, and in the final in Paris they faced Arsenal. The Gunners’ goalkeeper Jens Lehmann was sent off early on, but Barça still made hard work of it. Even down to ten men the Gooners could have won, but in the end that extra man told and Ronaldinho ended up being named Champions League Player of the Year.
He didn’t have the greatest of games that night, but what appeals to me about him is you watch him in a game where Barcelona are struggling and he might be struggling too, yet he will do six things that stand out. He will lay a pass off with his arse or something like that, and that is what people pay to see. On the TV programme Soccer AM they will show ten examples of ‘showboating’ and six of them will be him in the same game. But he’s not doing it to get on television – he’s doing it to show how good he is. And it’s not really showboating if it comes off, is it?
Even legends have their problems, though. After his brilliant 2002 World Cup, the finals in Germany four years later were a disappointment for him and for Brazil, who struggled throughout and made an early exit from the competition.
The 2007/08 season for Barcelona was also disappointing and it became clear that he was not adored as he once had been. The playboy lifestyle must have been taking its toll. The answer to that was simple: it was time to move on. Eventually, he moved to AC Milan for £14 million in the summer of 2008. The massive San Siro stadium was half-filled with fans who’d turned up just to see him arrive at the club – echoes of Barcelona five years earlier – and how they roared as he put on a red-and-black striped shirt bearing the number 80 (the year of his birth) for them. I can understand why too.
I look at it like this: would I put my hands in my pockets and pay to see him? One hundred per cent I would. There’s a video of him playing futsal when he was about ten. He is back-heeling goals, there are overhead kicks, everything. He was actually going past people and keeping the ball in the air while he was doing it. It is fantastic. Mind you, it’s a good job he didn’t try that at Cornard Dynamos in Suffolk where I played at ten – he’d have been larruped into the nearest spring onion field.