He who laughs last

World Player of the Year twice in a row, Ronaldinho is poised to join the list of football immortals who have defined World Cup tournaments through skill and personality alone, writes Keith Duggan

Ronaldinho

In an age cluttered with the bric-a-brac of celebrity and disposable genius, Ronaldinho of Brazil has been lauded by some of the weightiest names in football as the real and permanent thing.

The 2006 World Cup has a rich stable of players whose arc of achievement touches upon greatness. But it is the smiling Brazilian number 10 who has been distinguished as the brightest of his generation and a man whose intuitive and joyful brand of unrivalled excellence on the football field now leaves him poised to join the immortal role call of Pele, Cryuff and Maradona as a player capable of defining a World Cup tournament through skill and personality alone.

"Watching him is a sheer delight," praised the rehabilitated Argentinian hero Maradona after attending a Barcelona match. "He wants to touch people through his play, inspire them. He is hands down the best player in the world."

That was two years ago, months before Ronaldinho claimed the first of his consecutive World Player of the Year awards and just as he was beginning to stamp himself on the consciousness of the Premiership culture through the return to European pre-eminence of Barcelona.

He did not grace this year's Champions League final in Paris with anything like the hypnotic performance many had hoped for, turning in a clever and low-key 90 minutes in a season finale that will go down as interesting but ultimately forgettable.

There was no transcendent moment, like that which Zinedine Zidane conjured up for Real Madrid with an unforgettable volley in Glasgow four years ago, or like those grainy black and white strides towards greatness provided by George Best and Bobby Charlton in 1968, when Manchester United won the European trophy 10 years after the soul of the club was fractured by the Munich air-crash.

Nor was there anything like the hallucinogenic scenes prompted by the slow, impossible comeback from Steven Gerrard's unfancied Liverpool team against the accomplished AC Milan in Istanbul last year.

Ronaldinho did not take Paris in the way that previous star players have managed to make certain football cities forever their own. But then he did not need to. He had contributed enormously to Barcelona's steady graft through Europe and joined up with his Brazilian countrymen as the toast of Barcelona, as a proven champion and as the most marketable and highly-regarded football player in the world.

At the age of 26, he is reaching his athletic prime and seems blessed with a temperament of tripped-out bliss, showing none of the vulnerability to fame or darkly addictive leanings that ultimately consumed the athletic talents of previous luminaries like Garrincha or Maradona himself.

In fact, beyond his extravagant abilities with a football and a strongly competitive spirit, there is nothing to distinguish Ronaldinho from most other privileged 26-year-olds. The age of savage media and public scrutiny has made many artists who have achieved fame turn strange and paranoid but although the Brazilian has eclipsed David Beckham as the most commercially viable player in soccer, there is nothing like the same interest in his private life.

Perhaps that is because it is perceived he lacks the Englishman's conventional good looks: a Real Madrid marketing man infamously said on record that "Ronaldinho is so ugly that he would sink us as a brand." But it is also because he temperamentally indifferent to the flash of the cameraman's bulb. As he remarked himself last season, "My life is too simple to sell newspapers."

The popular impression of Ronaldinho is that he remains the preternaturally gifted child who managed to transport his game from his childhood streets in Porto Alegre to the grand beauty of the Camp Nou stadium without ever really noticing the change in his surroundings. His story is stubbornly ordinary, lacking the cinematic appeal of Maradona, whose edgy brilliance shone like a diamond through the dust and squalor of his surroundings on the edge of Buenos Aires.

The black and white footage of a young Maradona performing football tricks with sweetly innocent pride, the barrel chest swelling even then, has become one of the most famous pieces of film in the vast global soccer archive. It seemed terribly loaded when viewed in retrospect, after the Argentinian's predestined sweep to greatness and his equally breathtaking decline into the netherworld of narcotics and delusion.

There is some equally precious film of the adolescent Ronaldinho that captures him effortlessly deceiving opponents with his instinctively quick and balletic control of the ball. The material was recently featured on the latest Nike adverts, complemented by the adult Ronaldinho executing the same inimitable trickery with the trademark expression of open, unspoilt joy in his gift.

"And the great thing is there is no trick photography," says the soccer broadcaster Graham Hunter, who lives in Barcelona.

"That was genuine footage and they got him to replicate it. There was a prior old advert where Ronaldinho would hit the crossbar and the football would come straight back. I am not sure that he managed to get the ball to return to him obediently on every single occasion, they might have manipulated that a little. But he did hit the bar every time."

Ronaldo de Assis Moriera was already highly regarded at his boyhood club Gremio, then coached by Luiz Felipe Scolari. His childhood was not uncomfortable and guided by loving, disciplined parents and his devotion to his older brother Roberto (named after the Brazilian star Rivelino), who was being groomed for greatness in the late 1980s.

Roberto had signed for the Gremio senior team by his 17th birthday and this new-found affluence was immediately reflected in the acquisition of an outdoor swimming pool at the family home.

That symbol of wealth became associated with the one true episode of tragedy that has overshadowed Ronaldinho's normal, sunny upbringing. At a party to celebrate Roberto's 18th birthday and his own 19th wedding anniversary, the boy's father Joao suffered a heart attack and was discovered face down in the water.

Joao had been a dedicated but unremarkable city player, playing with the second division amateur side Cruzeiro. He was a dominant figure in the first eight years of Ronaldinho's life, tirelessly working on the boy's fundamental football skills and possessing a strong video archive featuring Pele, Valde, Romario and Maradona, which Ronaldinho continued to watch long after he knew every image by heart.

On the rare occasions that he has spoken of his father, Ronaldinho revealed he has a recording of a family conversation in which his father promised him that he would grow up to be a great player like his brother and that he still listens to the tape regularly.

And when he looks to the sky after scoring for Barcelona or Brazil, it is to pay homage to the memory of this father.

As it happened, Roberto did not fulfil the teenage promise, a knee injury destroying his plans to play in the 1992 Olympics.

He had lost the ineffable half-step and elusiveness when he returned from injury and went from being a mercurial midfield prize to a hustling workaday professional, winning professional contracts in three continents without ever once coming close to wearing the camisa amarela of Brazil.

The slender Ronaldinho, with the distinctive buck-toothed smile and the languid, athletic frame, began to leave glittering touchstones on his march to greatness.