Chapter 1Funchal

Foreword

I have spent twenty years in dressing rooms and mixed zones, and the thing that interests me about footballers is almost never the football.

The football is visible. Anyone can watch it, and the people who write about it well are numerous and I am not sure I am among them. What is not visible is the arrangement a man makes with his own body and his own history in order to keep doing the visible thing for twenty-three years, and that arrangement is the subject of this book.

Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro was born in Funchal in February 1985, the fourth child of a municipal gardener and a cook, in a house on a lane on Madeira where the family was poor in the ordinary and unromantic way. His father drank. His father died in 2005, at fifty-two, of liver failure, while his son was twenty and already at Manchester United, and the two of them never had the conversation the son has said in several interviews that he wanted.

Everything in this book runs through that.

I am aware of how that sounds. The absent-father reading is the laziest available instrument in sports biography and I have tried to earn it rather than assume it. What earns it here is the specificity of the response. He did not become reckless, which is the more common shape. He became the most controlled athlete of his generation: five sleep blocks rather than one night, six meals timed to the minute, a body composition maintained into his forties at a level that the physiological literature on ageing did not predict was available. That regime is not a training method. It is a position taken against the possibility of losing anything else, and it has been held without relenting for a quarter of a century.

At Sporting's academy at Alcochete they mocked his Madeiran accent and his thinness. At fifteen he had cardiac surgery for a racing heart and was back in training within days. At eighteen he played a friendly against Manchester United at the Alvalade and the United players asked their manager in the dressing room afterwards to sign him, which is a thing professionals do not normally do.

Then the twenty-three years: United, Real Madrid, Juventus, United again, Al Nassr. Five Ballons d'Or. Five European Cups. A European Championship for Portugal in 2016, won from the touchline in a final he left injured in the twenty-fifth minute, coaching. The all-time record for goals in men's international football. The most-followed personal account on the internet.

Three things about how this is written.

The Messi rivalry is treated as a structural fact rather than as a debate. For fifteen years the two best footballers alive played in the same league at the same time, which had never happened before, and each of them raised the other's ceiling. I do not settle it. Anyone who tells you it is settled is telling you which one they like.

The off-pitch record is in the middle of the book and not appended to the end. In 2019 he accepted a suspended sentence and a substantial fine in Spain over image-rights tax arrangements, a matter he did not contest. And there is the allegation made by Kathryn Mayorga concerning a 2009 encounter in Las Vegas, which he has always denied, describing the encounter as consensual. Nevada prosecutors announced in 2019 that they would not bring charges, citing an inability to prove the allegation beyond a reasonable doubt. A civil action was later resolved. I have set out the allegation, the denial, the prosecutorial decision and the disposition, and I have not gone beyond what those documents support, in either direction.

And the children are the late chapters because the evidence says they should be. The most credible reading of the post-2022 material is that the family became the actual centre of his interior life while the playing career continued as the thing he cannot stop doing, and the two are not the same.

On sources: match and competition records, contemporaneous coverage in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and English, club and federation statements, court and tribunal documents in the Spanish tax matter and the Nevada and civil filings, and his own extensive published interviews. I conducted no interviews for this book. Where a translation is mine I have said so.

He scores, and he runs forty metres to a spot on the touchline he chose the instant the ball crossed the line, and he leaps and spins and lands and shouts a syllable that children on six continents now shout in playgrounds.

He has been doing it since 2013 and he is forty-one years old. The interesting question is not how. It is what he is still answering.

Chapter 1 · Funchal

The island sits in the Atlantic six hundred miles southwest of Lisbon and a thousand miles north of the West African coast, a volcanic outcrop the size of a small Welsh county, its highest peak (Pico Ruivo) rising six thousand feet above the harbour at Funchal where the cruise ships anchor. The climate is mild year round. The terraced hillsides above the port grow bananas and grapes for the fortified wine that gave the island its only sustained export across four centuries. The streets in the part of Funchal called Santo António, where the Aveiro family lived on a sloped lane named Quinta do Falcão, were narrow and steep, paved in worn black basalt cobble that had been laid by Portuguese masons in the nineteenth century and that, by the mid-1980s when Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro was born there on the morning of February 5, 1985, had become slick from a hundred years of footfall.

He was born at 10:20 in the morning on Tuesday February 5, 1985, at the Cruz de Carvalho Hospital in Funchal. He weighed nearly nine pounds at birth and measured fifty-two centimetres long. He was the fourth and youngest child of Maria Dolores dos Santos and José Dinis Aveiro, younger brother to Elma (born 1973), Hugo (1975), and Katia (1977). The pregnancy had been unplanned. Maria Dolores's sister, who was working in a Funchal orphanage at the time, suggested the name Cristiano based on a child she had encountered in the orphanage's care; Maria Dolores and José Dinis added Ronaldo as the middle name in honour of the actor Ronald Reagan. The baptism was held later that afternoon at the Santo António parish church. The Reverend António Rodriguez Rebola was conducting the ceremony. The booking had been for six in the evening but José Dinis and his chosen godfather, the Andorinha club captain Fernão Barros Sousa, were half an hour late, having gone first to the four o'clock match between Andorinha and Ribeiras Bravas. Maria Dolores walked the priest around the church with the baby in her arms, trying to keep him calm, until father and godfather finally arrived from the stadium.

The house had four rooms. The roof was corrugated metal and leaked in the November rains, and Maria Dolores would routinely fetch bricks and mortar from the town hall to patch it. The family of six (José Dinis Aveiro, his wife Maria Dolores, and their four children, of whom Cristiano was the youngest) slept in two bedrooms and ate at a small table in a kitchen whose window looked across a strip of garden onto the back wall of the house behind. The wages came in two streams. José Dinis was the kit man for the youth football club Andorinha, two streets down the hill, a role that paid him a modest weekly fee for laundering the team's strips and for arranging the equipment before training sessions. He supplemented this by working irregular hours as a municipal gardener for the Funchal city council, a position he had been given through a family connection and that he held intermittently across the years of Cristiano's childhood, losing it twice and being rehired both times by superiors who knew the family. Maria Dolores worked as a domestic cleaner in the houses of more prosperous families in the upper neighbourhoods of Funchal where the cobbled lane climbs toward the cathedral. She walked to work each morning before light. She was thirty at the time of Cristiano's birth. She had wanted to terminate the pregnancy. She said this herself, in interviews given decades later, with a clarity her son did not flinch from when he was asked about it. She had four children already. The house was not large enough for a fifth. José Dinis was drinking by then with the regularity that would, twenty years on, kill him. There had been no money. The clinic in Funchal had refused her request. The boy was born.

He was named after Ronald Reagan. José Dinis was an admirer of American films and an admirer in particular of Reagan, whose pre-political career as a B-movie actor had made him, in the broadcast culture of late-1970s Madeira, one of the recognisable Hollywood faces. Cristiano was the Portuguese form of Christian, the saint's name; Ronaldo was the patrilineal middle name in honour of the actor; dos Santos Aveiro was the maternal-and-paternal surname construction that Portuguese law followed. The full name was the bureaucratic given. The family called him Cris. The neighbourhood called him, by the time he was five, the boy with the ball; by five he was already, by every account from the lane, never seen without one. He carried it to the dinner table. He kicked it against the wall of the house behind theirs until the woman who lived there, an elderly widow named Senhora Conceição, came out and shouted at him. He kicked it on the cobbled lane between the parked cars until the cars' owners came out and shouted at him. He kicked it in the small concrete play yard of the primary school he attended on the next street up, until the teachers caught him and sent him back to class. The ball was, by every account from the period, the substance of his interior life across the entirety of his childhood. He did not, by the same accounts, have other interests of any sustained kind. He had this one.

What he also had, across the same years, was the atmospheric reality of his father's drinking. The drinking had not always been there. José Dinis had met Maria Dolores when she was eighteen and he was twenty, when he worked for a fishmonger and later as a stone cutter and council gardener, and the early years of the marriage had been, by her own account in the decades since, years of happiness. The war ended them. Dinis had been called up to the Portuguese army during the colonial independence wars, the same wars that were consuming Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique in the late 1960s and early 1970s as those territories fought for independence from the Portuguese imperial apparatus. He served in Africa and returned ten months later as, by Maria Dolores's characterisation, a greyer version of himself. The smile had gone. The joy had gone. The man who returned had aged by a decade in ten months, his head, by his wife's reckoning, filled with images of war that he would not speak about and that he had apparently concluded he could not speak about to anyone in his household or on the cobbled lane in Santo António. He stopped working. From that point forward, by every account from those who knew the family across the years that followed, he was in the bar from early morning. The bar and the bottle were the medium through which the war's damage expressed itself across the remaining decades of his life.

José Dinis was a quiet drunk rather than a violent one. He did not beat his wife. He did not, by the children's later recollections, beat his children. He drank (wine in the day, brandy in the evening) and grew progressively quieter as the alcohol accumulated in him, and slept early, and woke each morning without comment on the previous evening, and went to work at Andorinha's kit shed and at the council gardens in approximately the same number of weekly hours he had worked the prior week. The drinking was the climate. The climate did not produce, in the household, the dramatic crises the cliché of the Portuguese drinking father might suggest. The climate produced, instead, the quiet ambient fact of a father who was present in the house but who was not, in any psychologically operative sense, present in the children's lives. He did not, in the early years, attend Cristiano's training sessions at Andorinha — though he was, technically, the kit man for the same club. He absorbed his alcohol and conducted his work and slept. He died in September 2005 in a London hospital, of a liver condition that had been long developing, while Cristiano was in his second season at Manchester United and could not, for reasons related to the team's match schedule and the visa logistics of the time, reach the hospital before his father lost consciousness. Cristiano has said, on multiple occasions across the subsequent two decades, that the great wound of his life is that his father did not see what he became. It is the only wound from the early years he has spoken about with any consistency. He has spoken about it often.

There was also the question of the food. The family budget, across the years of Cristiano's childhood, admitted bread at every meal, cold cuts every two weeks, and meat on Sundays. The mid-week menu was soup, prepared by Maria Dolores in the few hours between her morning and afternoon cleaning shifts. Chicken was reserved for family celebrations. Nobody in the household went hungry, but nobody in the household was adequately nourished either. The Nacional youth coaches who subsequently managed Cristiano's early development at the larger club would, across his first season there, routinely ask Maria Dolores to supplement his diet with more fish and meat — the boy was thin enough to concern them, his frame more obviously undernourished than the other boys his age, even in a neighbourhood where undernourishment was not uncommon. She supplemented the diet as best the household budget allowed. The thinness remained a feature of his body into adolescence. It would, across the subsequent decade and a half of obsessive physical reconstruction, be the thing he would work hardest to reverse.

The football that he played, between the ages of six and twelve, was played first at Andorinha (where his father had the keys to the kit shed) and then, beginning at age ten, at the larger Funchal club Nacional, who had recruited him from Andorinha's youth ranks after his coach there, a man named Francisco Afonso, telephoned a friend at Nacional and said that the boy had to be seen. The boy was seen. Nacional took him into their youth setup. The pace at which he progressed across the next two years was the pace that the recruiters of Sporting Clube de Portugal (the major Lisbon club whose youth academy was, by the early 1990s, the most respected developmental pipeline in Portuguese football) eventually noticed. Sporting sent a scout to Funchal in late 1996. The scout watched a youth tournament at the Estádio dos Barreiros. He returned to Lisbon and recommended the eleven-year-old to the Sporting director of youth recruitment. The Sporting director, having reviewed the report, dispatched a more senior scout to Funchal a month later. The senior scout watched another match. He recommended the boy to the academy director. The academy director, in May of 1997, telephoned the Aveiro household directly. The conversation was brief. The proposition was that Cristiano would, the following autumn at age twelve, be brought to the Sporting academy in Alcochete, on the south bank of the Tagus across from Lisbon, to live in the academy dormitory with the other boys his age and to begin the formal developmental programme that the academy conducted. The cost of his housing and education would be borne by Sporting. The family would have to consent. The family consented. The Andorinha years, from age six to age eight, were the formal beginning. Andorinha was a small Madeiran football club whose youth setup operated out of a modest concrete pitch a few minutes' walk down the lane from the Aveiro household. The club had been founded in 1934. It carried, by the late 1980s, approximately a hundred boys across its various age-group teams. The boys were the boys of the immediate Santo António neighbourhood. Marítimo, the island's larger and more prestigious club, was only a ten-minute walk away but was effectively a different world: a club with better facilities, more competitive opposition, and senior-team football in the Portuguese top division. Andorinha was the neighbourhood club. The boys played in the narrow cobbled street between parked cars before and after training, the uneven terrain demanding a close-control technique the formal sessions alone could not have produced. His teammates called him a abelha (the little bee) for his insect-like speed. They also called him chorão (cry-baby) because he wept on the pitch whenever Andorinha lost. A 2-0 deficit at half-time would find him weeping in the dressing room; he would then return to the pitch and single-handedly overturn the scoreline. He wept when he passed to teammates who failed to score. He wept when they did not pass to him. The emotional response to defeat was the first visible form of the competitive intolerance that would, across the subsequent four decades, organise his career. What was unusual was not the tears but what the tears produced. He would stay after the formal sessions ended and perform the technical drills in solo repetitions until the parents arriving to collect their children had gone. He worked at a small field with a ball against a wall. He would do it for hours. The first trophy he won, a player-of-the-tournament award at a local youth competition when he was eight years old, would eventually be displayed in the CR7 Museum he opened in Funchal in 2013. It was the beginning of a collection the museum would, across the subsequent decades, struggle to accommodate.

The Nacional period from age ten to age twelve had been the consequence of his godfather Fernão Barros Sousa's intervention. Sousa had been both the Andorinha club captain and Cristiano's baptismal godfather; he had not known how good his godson was until he attended a match in his capacity as team captain and saw the boy play. He was, by his own subsequent account, "hugely surprised." He took steps. Nacional were Andorinha's close rivals on the island (the clubs' grounds were adjacent) and were a substantially larger and better-resourced institution. Marítimo, the other major Madeiran club, had prior claim on the boy: they had a standing policy of matching any Nacional offer for local talent. The deal that transferred Cristiano from Andorinha to Nacional was concluded while the Marítimo scout Bernardino Rosa was unavoidably absent in Lisbon on a Monday that had been designated for a decisive meeting with Andorinha. No one called to reschedule. By the time Rosa returned to Funchal and telephoned Andorinha to confirm the meeting, the deal with Nacional had been done. Rosa could not believe it. "I never believed he'd become the player he is today," Rosa would later say. The transfer fee Nacional paid Andorinha for the ten-year-old was two sets of kits and twenty footballs, or, in the version of the story that Balague documents as the financially precise one, the equivalent of approximately twenty-five thousand escudos. Cristiano had been, in the transfer market of Madeiran youth football, worth two sets of strips and a box of balls. It was the market's valuation. The market was wrong by approximately a billion euros.

Nacional was the larger Funchal club, whose senior team played in the Portuguese second tier and whose youth setup operated at a more competitive scale than Andorinha's. The boy moved to Nacional in the summer of 1995. The Nacional youth coaches who managed his first two seasons included Pedro Talhinhas and António Mendonça, two experienced youth figures whose assessments of the boy converged on a description that was, in its essentials, identical to Andorinha's: the technical capacity was substantive; the supplementary-work appetite was the distinguishing feature. Talhinhas's reading was that the boy was "a player from the street with exceptional technique in both feet" and that his self-sufficient childhood ("spending long periods without any family contact," by Talhinhas's account, "finding answers to problems himself") had given him the mental weapons to improvise in one-on-ones that the more settled, less isolated boys around him had not developed. His first challenge at Nacional had been tactical: the boy did not pass. He picked the ball up and drove toward goal. His teammates put up with it because the team won matches by nine or ten goals, most of them scored by Cristiano. The coaches' first sustained effort was to persuade him that the ball was not his, that football was a team sport. He was resistant to the persuasion. The Nacional coaches would, across the two seasons, ultimately leave the persuasion incomplete. The complete footballer was the work of the Alcochete years that followed. Talhinhas relayed his reading, in 1996, to the Sporting Lisbon scout who had been dispatched to attend a Nacional youth tournament at the Estádio dos Barreiros. The Sporting scout's report had matched Talhinhas's. The dispatching of a more senior Sporting official followed. The phone call to the Aveiro household came in the spring of 1997.

He flew alone to Lisbon in September of 1997. He was twelve years old. He cried at the gate at Funchal airport (he has spoken about this too) and he cried on the small twin-engine plane across the half-hour flight to Lisbon, and he cried at the arrivals terminal where the academy minivan was waiting for him, and he cried at the Alcochete dormitory the first three nights he slept there. The crying eventually stopped. The boy was launched. The next chapter is the chapter in which the launching takes hold.

The Funchal the boy had left was not the Funchal the man would eventually return to. The man would, in 2014, purchase the property his family had been renting from the Funchal town hall for decades (the house on Quinta do Falcão whose four rooms and corrugated roof and leaking walls had been the physical container of the first twelve years of his life) and would renovate it. He would open a museum around the corner, in 2013, in a building that formerly housed the city council offices. He would open a hotel at the port, overlooking the harbour where the cruise ships anchored, in the first deployment of the CR7 Hotels chain that the Pestana partnership would build into six properties across three continents. The Funchal he returned to was the Funchal of the tourism industry that had been building around the CR7 brand since his first European championship appearances in 2004. The island had a statue of him, installed in 2014 in the seafront boulevard below the old town — a bronze figure approximately five feet tall, posed in the celebration stance that would eventually become the siuuuu, and the statue had, by the late 2010s, attracted the kind of pilgrim tourist traffic that the island's tourism industry had not anticipated when the civic authorities commissioned it. The gap between the corrugated roof on Quinta do Falcão and the hotel at the port was the gap the playing career had produced. He had, in the most literal geographical register, returned to the starting point and rebuilt it around the career the starting point had launched. The starting point was the Funchal chapter. The chapter had made the man who made the museum. The museum contained the trophies. The first trophy in the museum was the player-of-the-tournament award from the under-eight local youth competition, in the autumn of 1993, when the boy from the corrugated-roof house first won something. The first thing he ever won. It was in the glass case at the museum's entrance. The biography closes by knowing that the glass case had a beginning, and that the beginning was the cobbled lane and the woman shouting at him from the window and the ball against the wall that he had refused to stop kicking until the dark came.