There is no better footballer than Cristiano Ronaldo. Says Cristiano Ronaldo. Maybe he’s right. But he obviously lacks something very crucial.
“One of the best players of all time,” says Cristiano Ronaldo’s Wikipedia entry.
He himself, who becomes almost biblical for a professional footballer, sees it the same way, he just emphasized that again. “I think I’m the most complete player who has ever existed. It may ultimately be a question of personal preference, but I don’t see anyone who is better than me,” said the all-rounder in the Spanish football show “El Chiringuito” . “I’m strong in the header, I shoot direct free kicks, I meet with both feet, I’m fast, I’m strong and I jump up.”
He was the most complete player of all time, he concluded completely and pushed a few superlatives afterwards. “If I score 920, 925 or 930 goals at the end, I don’t care. I am the best in the story. Point”. The statistics don’t lie. He looked at her himself.
He would not have necessary this persistent knock on his own shoulder. Even more: this repeated existence on one’s own sporting importance distinguishes it from others very big. It makes him smaller. Ronaldo wants to be the biggest, absolutely, undisputed – and is everything, just not the biggest. He lacks something crucial for this: the ability not to take himself so important. There are enough worthy examples in sports Olympus that had this ability.
Let’s take Diego Armando Maradona. When asked who he considers to be the best footballer, he always answered differently: sometimes it was Alfredo di Stéfano, sometimes Pelé, another time Lothar Matthäus. He only did not name himself. There are hardly anyone among those who saw Maradona playing, who does not think the 1.65 meter little ball magician.
Or let’s take Muhammad Ali. No footballer, but “The Greatest”, the greatest, he never left the slightest doubt. His virtue was not modest, at least not in public. It was different privately, Ali did not work with his skills. He had only understood early on that the large flap belongs to the staging like the provocative dance in the ring. An ironic armor that protected from unpleasant opponents and the unbill in the world.
At Cristiano Ronaldo it is feared that his arrogance is real. There are signs. His swell when he has to go to the exchange bench, his tirades towards referees and players, if they don’t do it the way he wants it, or his malicious comments towards Lionel Messi, if he won the balloon again. And not Cristiano Ronaldo. The best. Point.
If football was only about who scores with which part of the body and how many goals, the Portuguese would certainly be a very big one. But football is more than statistics and priest lists. Football is dreaming, suffering and also a little melancholy.
Melancholy, as another famous Portuguese put it: Fernando Pessoa, thoughtful author and poet, one of the most important writers of the 20th century. In Pessoa’s most famous book, the “Book of Unrest”, you can learn a lot about the fuance of the existence and the beauty of the comparable. “I’m nothing. I will never be anything. I couldn’t want me to be something. Apart from that, I have all the dreams of the world in me,” it says.
It is doubtful that Cristiano Ronaldo knows the works of his compatriot.