Documentary the latest move in constructed Ronaldo myth

Today a new documentary film about Cristiano Ronaldo gets its worldwide release. Directed by Anthony Wonke and executive-produced by Asif Kapadia, who crafted the brilliant documentaries on Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse, the movie Ronaldo is sure to be slickly produced and beautiful to look at. According to a new biography of Ronaldo by Guillem Balague, the movie is the latest front in a propaganda offensive devised by Ronaldo's agent, Jorge Mendes.

Mendes decided a couple of years ago that Cristiano's image had to improve if he was ever going to win another Ballon D'Or. Too many people had got used to thinking of Ronaldo as a super-talented but brattish and petulant man-baby. If he was going to claw back ground in the war for hearts and minds he has been waging against Lionel Messi, he would have to change. From now on he would sign autographs, try not to be too openly contemptuous of his team-mates, and generally seek to project a more friendly image. It would be surprising if the version of Ronaldo presented in the movie veers far away from this agreed-upon image.

‘Keep criticism at a distance’

Unlike the film, Balague’s book

Cristiano Ronaldo: The Biography

is not authorised. At the outset, he details the negotiations with Mendes when the book was first conceived. “We’re going to do this together, but you can’t screw me,” Mendes said. According to Balague, Ronaldo’s entourage believe their role is to “keep criticism at a distance, or control it, create the narrative and keep him on his pedestal”. Mendes was prepared to offer co-operation but only in return for control. It proved impossible for the sides to agree.

The book, therefore, is a patchwork of impressions gathered from people who have crossed Ronaldo’s path – team-mates, coaches, journalists, friends – with no direct contribution from Ronaldo himself. And yet it’s doubtful whether an authorised book could have been much more informative. At Ronaldo’s exaggerated level of fame, it’s difficult to know where myth ends and reality begins.

Everyone agrees Ronaldo is the hardest-working and most ambitious player they have seen. Balague suggests that his drive to be a great player and his obvious hunger for admiration and acclaim owes something to the fact that he didn’t receive enough appreciation when he was younger. His father drank too much and his mother was overworked, so the young Cristiano was often left to his own devices. He would play football for 10 or 12 hours a day. Yet there are lots of children who grow up in similar circumstances, and few of them turn out like Cristiano Ronaldo.

You are struck by the contrast between Ronaldo's experience at Manchester United, where he was just another player, albeit an exceptional one, and his life after he joined Real Madrid, by which time he had become a kind of walking Wonder of the World. Madrid is a circus. Ronaldo scored more than 50 goals for five seasons in a row. Somehow his feats recede into the background as everyone's attention and emotional energy focuses on squabbling and power-plays.

Obsessed with individual awards and records, and assailed by a sense of insecurity his goals never seem to quell, Ronaldo retreats into magnificent isolation in his gated community, throwing occasional lavish parties for friends, but trusting only the small inner circle of his mother, his son, his siblings and his agent. According to Balague, he has never told Cristiano Jr who his mother is, and that’s not the only echo of Michael Jackson in this story.

I had a glimpse of Ronaldo's world last summer, a couple of hours after Portugal lost 4-0 to Germany at the World Cup. The terminal at Salvador airport was standing-room only, with thousands of mainly Mexican fans. Suddenly people started yelling and I saw a kind of rolling ruckus at the departures lounge. There on the other side of the Plexiglass was Ronaldo, walking down the empty corridor. Evidently that part of the terminal was cordoned off for the use of the teams. Ronaldo had his baseball cap on backwards and his flight socks pulled up to his knees. He was carrying his backpack on both shoulders and looked like a particularly large and athletic schoolboy.

Attention

Everyone whipped out their phones. The crowd screamed and banged on the wall to get his attention. He set his face and kept walking straight ahead. When they realised he wasn’t going to stop for photos they started shouting: “Messi, Messi! Te amo Messi, te amo Messi!” They roared with laughter. Ronaldo kept going until his corridor broadened out into a shopping area. He cut across away from the crowd, and disappeared down the corridor . Soon the other Portugal players came ambling down the same corridor, but few people paid any attention to them.

To witness this scene was to grasp how impossible it is for somebody like Ronaldo to have anything like a normal life. People talk about how fame warps personalities of the famous, but actually it has a more obvious warping effect on the behaviour of the people around them. In the presence of fame like Ronaldo’s, people’s normal faculties desert them and a stampede mentality takes hold. If Ronaldo has cut himself off from the world, it’s because the rest of us have given him no choice.