Ronaldo

There are two Ronaldos in the record books, and they belong to the same man.

The first was a teenager nobody could stop. Between 1994 and 1999 he was, by the reckoning of most people who watched him, the most dangerous attacker football had produced. The second came back from three knee operations, could no longer run the way he once did, and won a World Cup anyway.

Both of them scored 352 goals in 518 club games. Only one of them is the reason grown men still argue about what might have been.

Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima was born in Itaguaí, outside Rio de Janeiro, on 18 September 1976. His parents separated when he was eleven. He left school soon after.

His first serious football was futsal — the five-a-side indoor game played on a hard court with a heavy ball. He joined Social Ramos at twelve and is often said to have scored 166 goals in his first season, once putting away eleven of his team's twelve in a single match. He has said since that futsal will always be his first love, and the influence shows: the close control in tight space, the toe-poke finish, the sense that he was quicker with the ball than without it.

Flamengo, the club he supported, turned him down. He had missed training because he could not afford the bus fare for the hour-long ride.

Jairzinho, the 1970 World Cup winner, was coaching São Cristóvão when he spotted him. He recommended the sixteen-year-old to his old club, Cruzeiro. Ronaldo scored four times on his youth debut.

He made his professional debut in May 1993, aged sixteen. On 7 November, in the Brasileirão, he scored five in one match against Bahia — a 6–0 win — at seventeen years and fifty days old.

Two seasons at Cruzeiro produced 44 goals in 47 matches. Cruzeiro won the Copa do Brasil that year; he played no part in it.

He was in Brazil's squad for the 1994 World Cup at seventeen and did not play a minute. Brazil won it. Afterwards, on Romário's advice, he moved to PSV Eindhoven.

He scored ten minutes into his debut. He scored thirty league goals in his first Dutch season. After a hat-trick against Bayer Leverkusen, Rudi Völler — a World Cup winner himself — told a press conference he had never in his life seen an eighteen-year-old play that way.

His second season was cut short by the first knee problem of his career. He still managed nineteen goals in twenty-one games.

Barcelona paid a world record £13.2 million in July 1996. Bobby Robson signed him to an eight-year contract and played him alone up front.

He stayed one year and scored 47 goals in 49 matches.

The goal people remember came at Compostela in October 1996. He collected the ball inside his own half, shrugged off a tackle, ran the length of the pitch, went past two more defenders inside the box and finished into the corner. The camera cut to Robson on the touchline with his hands on his head. Spanish television replayed it over and over for days afterwards.

He won the Pichichi with 34 league goals in 37 games — a La Liga Pichichi, and 47 in all competitions, a Barcelona club season record Messi equalled in 2009-10 and finally passed in 2010-11 with 48. He won the European Golden Shoe. He scored the winner in the Cup Winners' Cup final. At twenty, he became the youngest FIFA World Player of the Year in history.

Then the contract talks collapsed. Barcelona's president said "he's ours for life" one day and "it's all over, Ronaldo is going" the next.

Inter Milan paid $27 million in the summer of 1997, breaking the world record again. Ronaldo became the second player after Maradona to break it twice.

The Italian press named him il Fenomeno. He scored 25 league goals in his first season and took the Ballon d'Or at twenty-one — still, as of 2026, the youngest ever to receive it — 21 years and 96 days.

His finish against Lazio in the 1998 UEFA Cup final is the one that survives on tape: one-on-one with the goalkeeper, a feint right, a feint left, no touch on the ball, the keeper on the floor, the finish rolled in. Alessandro Nesta, who marked him that night, later called it the worst experience of his career.

Then, on 21 November 1999 against Lecce, his knee gave way. He had ruptured a tendon and needed surgery.

He came back on 12 April 2000 for the Coppa Italia final. He lasted six minutes before the kneecap tendon ruptured completely. Nilton Petrone, his physiotherapist, described it as the worst football injury he had ever seen and said the kneecap had effectively exploded.

He missed the whole of the following season and most of the two around it.

Before that first injury he had 42 goals in 58 Serie A games — in the hardest league in the world to score in, against the best defenders of the era.

Brazil had struggled through qualification without him. He had barely played in two years.

He scored eight goals at the 2002 World Cup and took the Golden Boot. He scored against every side Brazil faced except England. The winner against Turkey in the semi-final was a toe-poke on the run with almost no backlift — a futsal finish, from the courts of Rio.

The haircut was deliberate. He shaved his head except for a forelock, and later admitted it was a distraction: when he turned up to training like that, nobody asked about his leg any more.

In the final in Yokohama he scored twice against Germany. He was the first Brazilian to go to the German players afterwards and offer his condolences. Pelé, presenting the trophy to Cafu alongside Sepp Blatter, embraced him in tears afterwards.

Gérard Saillant, the French surgeon who had operated on his knee, said of him that day: "This gives hope to everyone who is injured. He's back to where he was."

He joined Real Madrid for €46 million and scored twice on his debut against Alavés, the first inside a minute of coming on. Twenty-three league goals that season, and the title.

At Old Trafford in April 2003 he scored a hat-trick that knocked Manchester United out of the Champions League, completing it with a swerving strike from thirty yards. When he was substituted after 67 minutes the home crowd stood and applauded him off. He has called it one of the most beautiful moments of his career.

He also fell out with Fabio Capello over his weight, and left in January 2007 thanking every coach he had worked with "except one."

Milan came next, then Corinthians, then hypothyroidism and a third rupture of a kneecap ligament. He retired in February 2011 at thirty-four.

"Mentally I wanted to continue," he said, "but I have to acknowledge that I lost to my body."

He never won the Champions League. In 2007, when Milan won it, he was cup-tied.

By competition

He played no international football at all in 2000 and 2001. Those are the missing rows, and they are the injury.

Fifteen World Cup goals in nineteen matches — a record when he set it in 2006, since passed by Miroslav Klose. Two World Cups won: 1994 as a seventeen-year-old who never left the bench, 2002 as its leading scorer and the man of the match in the final — the Golden Ball that year went to Oliver Kahn. Two Copa Américas. A Confederations Cup. Three FIFA World Player of the Year awards and two Ballons d'Or.

Zidane, who played with him at Madrid years after the knee had gone: "Without hesitation, Ronaldo is the best player I ever played with or against."

Mourinho, who worked as an interpreter at Barcelona in 1996 and watched him every day: "the greatest player I have ever seen in my life."

Cannavaro, asked to name the hardest opponent he ever faced: "I have no doubt. Ronaldo, the phenomenon. For my generation he was what Maradona or Pelé were for the previous ones. He was unmarkable."

Robson, who managed him at twenty: "Had he managed to stay free of injury, he had every chance of becoming the best footballer ever."

Thierry Henry put it in terms of what changed after him. Ronaldo, with Romário and George Weah, reinvented the centre-forward — the first to drop deep for the ball, drift wide, pull centre-backs out of position and run at them from thirty yards. Every modern striker expected to do all of that is working from a template he wrote.

Messi grew up wanting to be him. So did Salah. So did Rooney.

The 352 club goals are a fine career. The two years missing from the middle of them are why people still talk about him.