Cristiano Ronaldo sleeps in and skips breakfast on the million-dollar day—a day on which, to be tacky, he will make $1 million. (1) The day is crisp and bright, a sparkler, but Cristiano’s bedroom is dark until the electric blinds open wide like canal locks and the light floods into the room.
He gets to his feet, stretches, stands taller than his six feet one, and strolls down a hallway of eerie figurative paintings and passages to indoor swimming pools. He walks on his soles, but his posture gives the impression that he’s on his toes, rigid, a little bowlegged, like a guy at the gym who’s desperately in seek of shapelier calves. Everything about his body appears vacuum-sealed; one gets the impression that even his internal organs are slim-fit. When he reaches the bedroom of his 5-year-old son, Cristiano Jr., he says good morning (“Bom dia, Cris!”) before moving on to the bathroom, where he showers, cycles through his ablutions, reaches for the selectest few of the dozens of grooming products standing sentry on the counter, a forest of moisturizers.
1.Just about. He is the world’s highest-paid soccer player and the third-highest-paid athlete behind Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. Forbes values his earnings at $80 million a year. In addition to his $20 million salary and his CR7 business lines, he has worked with brands like Nike, Armani, KFC, and TAG Heuer. Today is a TAG day—a day on which he will earn a fat hunk of his endorsement deal.
He considers his reflection in the mirror: It is a good-looking face. His torso has so many defined muscles it looks borrowed from the Bodies exhibition, muscles without skin. His legs are smooth and tanned to the hip—a result of yacht holidays and the notorious habit he has of rolling his soccer shorts up at practice like girls on a high school cross-country team.
He (2) is a professional soccer player, with the reigning claim to best in the world. (3) He is a winger on the Real Madrid football club, the king’s team, a sports entity that claims 450 million worldwide fans, one of the three or four best soccer squads on earth. He is the captain of the Portuguese national team. He is the most recognizable athlete in the world. (Ahead of LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, and Barcelona (4) “rival” Lionel Messi. (5)) He is a billboard fixture. He is namesake to his very own underwear line.
2. Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro was named, in part, after Ronald Reagan, president of the United States at the time of his birth and his father’s favorite actor. “My parents named me after him because they both liked this name and thought it sounded strong,” he tells me. “I know that my father admired him.” 3. “No player can torment his opponent in more ways,” says Roger Bennett, co-host of the rabidly admired soccer-translated-for-Americans Men in Blazers podcast and TV show. “What do you call it in baseball—a five-tool player? He can just hurt you in every regard. He can break legs with a move, he can score from a distance, from close up, with his head. Incredible awareness of space, unbelievable decision-making, pace, power, strength, agility, mental sharpness, utter commitment to winning.” 4. Real Madrid and Barcelona are twin monoliths, winners of 26 of the past 31 league titles, defined in opposition by their historical, cultural, and strategic differences. The rivalry takes on super-sport dimensions, where each match represents a battle that has been waged for centuries in Spain between independence-seeking Catalonia (Barcelona) and the capital (Madrid) of the mother country. 5. These are two of the best who have ever lived, playing in the same league on the two greatest rival clubs in the sport. The last seven Ballon d’Or awards (for world player of the year) have gone to Ronaldo and Messi—one for Cristiano, followed by four for Leo, then two for CR. (Each has finished runner-up to the other in all but one instance.) But Cristiano has made a habit of dismissing the interpersonal, one-on-one conflict. “The rivalry has been created by the media,” he says to me. “To be honest, there are no problems between me and Messi. People have their own opinions about who they think is the better player. It is what it is, but there is no rivalry beyond games and what happens on the pitch.”
Practice with Real Madrid is in the afternoon, the first day back in mid-October from Cristiano’s qualifying with Portugal for the 2016 European Championship. Though practice is delayed, he still has a responsibility to Cristiano Jr. (6) With the exception of occasional visits from friends or drop-ins from Cristiano’s mother, Dolores, (7) it’s just the two of them alone in that sprawling modern house in the western suburbs of Madrid. Cristiano Jr. attends an American school five minutes away, just outside their gated community, and Cristiano Sr. likes to drive him when he can—likes to push beyond the Portuguese of the house and practice their Spanish and English in the car together.
6. Cristiano Jr. was born in 2010, but the identity of the mother has never been disclosed. Cristiano, 25 at the time, announced his son’s birth to the enormous surprise of fans. (He’d been dating supermodel Irina Shayk at the time—she is not the mother—and continued to date her until early 2015.) In the recent documentary Ronaldo, Cristiano addressed the matter at length: “I wanted to be a young father.… I have learned to be calmer, more cautious.… People speculate that it was with this girl or the other, or a surrogate mother. I’ve never told anyone and never will. I think I should keep that to myself. And later, when Cristiano is grown up, then I will talk to him and tell him what I did, what I felt, everything that went through my mind. Some kids never get to know their parents, neither father nor mother. Having a father is good enough. I don’t care what other people say—it doesn’t bother me. I always thought, and still think, that he will understand me.” 7. Cristiano was an “oops” baby. His mother, Dolores, and his father, Dinis, had one boy and two girls already, and this fourth was unexpected. His mother has said she considered an abortion—doubly significant due to her Catholic faith—before deciding to keep the baby that would be Cristiano. “He was a child that I wanted to abort,” Dolores has said. “God didn’t want that to happen, and I was blessed because of that, and God did not punish me. Sometimes Ronaldo makes fun of me and says, ‘You didn’t want me to be born. But now you see that I’m here helping all of you.’ And, well, sometimes we have a laugh about that.”
Before training, Cristiano fixes himself lunch and eats in his dining room beneath a painted portrait of his late father, who died of complications caused by years of alcohol abuse, when Cristiano was 20. The light is clean and enticing outside, and so Cristiano strolls the meandering driveway down to the sand-colored boxes of his eight-car garage, where he keeps some (but not all) of his fleet, including (reportedly) a Maserati GranCabrio, Bentley Continental GT, Porsche Cayenne Turbo, Lamborghini Aventador, Ferrari 599 GTO, (8) Rolls-Royce Phantom, Aston Martin DB9, team-issue Audi, etc. Once he digests his lunch, (9) he selects the Audi and drives himself to practice.
8. In January 2009, while playing for Manchester United, 23-year-old Cristiano badly crashed his two-day-old Ferrari in a tunnel near the Manchester airport. He got out of the car uninjured, left it on the shoulder, and caught a lift to practice, but a reputational stain of reckless indifference stuck to him for years afterward. 9. “I never diet. I don’t do this kind of diet,” he tells me. “I eat everything. I don’t, for example, eat pizza every day or McDonald’s every day. But sometimes I think is not bad, especially if you do the right things on the weekends. I take care of myself, train good, sleep good.”
Though Real Madrid is preparing to face a bottom-feeder team, “it’s the most easy that become the most difficult,” Cristiano knows. So he is strong at practice—two hours of squad-topping effort. (10) It should be that way: Cristiano is the highest-paid player on a team that can sometimes, during a match, put a half-billion dollars’ worth of talent on the field at once. (11) Though there have been downs, (12) his career is anomalous for its highly sustained ups. On Sporting Lisbon, Manchester United, and Real Madrid, he has stood as the archetypal example of a player you love when he’s on your team and loathe if he’s on anyone else’s. He doesn’t lose sleep over the fact. “If God can’t please everyone,” he said in 2009, “I won’t, either.”
10. “When you speak to people who know him, they all say he’s the hardest worker in training every day,” says Roger Bennett. “But what we’re talking about is elite athleticism and elite narcissism in equal measure. To translate this guy to the American sporting reality, it’s like taking Kobe Bryant’s competitive nature, the self-importance of Terrell Owens, a dash of Zoolander, finished off with a sprinkling of Alex Rodriguez’s vanity. Still, you can only marvel at his physical and mental ability to withstand the punishment he’s received on and off the field. Considering how he’s won, and continues to keep winning consistently with that much pressure, you are dealing with a remarkably calibrated mental and physical being.” 11. A few seasons ago, after Real Madrid won the league, Cristiano told the Spanish paper Marca: “On an individual level, I give my season a 10 and collectively [the squad] a 9.” 12. During one exceptional stretch of poor play and injuries in 2009, a sorcerer called Pepe the Wizard came forward to explain that he had been paid to cast a spell on Cristiano. He had no personal vendetta, Pepe said—it was just business. A Portuguese sorcerer (and CR fan) counter-cast a spell, and eventually Cristiano recovered to full health.
11. Porfirio Rubirosa Ariza was a Dominican diplomat, sportsman, and playboy famous for dating many of the most famous and richest women of his era. He died a playboy’s death in 1965 at the age of 56: After an all-nighter at a Paris nightclub in celebration of a polo victory, he drove his silver Ferrari into a tree.
12. Even when it comes to politics, the range of Jones’s access and experience is hard to believe. Musicians who have played for, and know, say, Clinton or Obama may be ten a penny these days, but how many others can also say, for instance, that they played—at the age of 18 as a trumpet player with Lionel Hampton’s big band (his first regular professional job)—at Dwight Eisenhower’s inaugural in 1953?
After picking up Cristiano Jr. from school in the afternoon, Cristiano calls his mother (who still lives on the Portuguese island of Madeira, (13) where Cristiano grew up, though in a new home on the water, a gift from her son) and his brother (who helps run some of CR’s businesses, including the CR7 Museum (14) on Madeira) and his agent, Jorge Mendes (for whom Cristiano bought a Greek island this summer). Cristiano puts his time in at his heavily mirrored personal gym. He takes a short nap with Cristiano Jr. (15) And then, around seven o’clock, he hops in the Rolls and makes his way to another house in the gated community.
13. Cristiano left his island home at 12, when the top Portuguese club, Sporting Lisbon, offered him a slot in their academy. He had never left the island before and was suddenly on his own. He says this was the hardest period of his life. His mother has said she felt she was abandoning him, “but it was for good reason.” Even at 18, when he was transferred to United, he was seen holding his mother’s hand when he crossed the street in Manchester. 14. The museum, in Funchal, houses all of Cristiano’s trophies and includes a life-size wax figure of Cristiano and a projection of Cristiano that dances on the wall (juggling a soccer ball) like the DNA cartoon in Jurassic Park. 15. “I think one of the most important qualities, one of the best qualities, is to recover,” he says. “I think sometimes the best training is to rest. We have plenty of games, training every day. So that when we have a break, switch off everything, try to do other things, to relax. When I’m off, I’m often doing nothing, just relax.”
16.He has no plans to trade up to this house: “No, no, because I think it’s too big for me. To be with two persons in 10,000 square, I think it’s too big for me.”
This house is like his, only bigger. No one lives here. The owner died a couple of years ago, Cristiano says, and the daughter grants him access when he needs it. He’s been photographed here “many times” and treats it as a hot set for the CR7 brand. (16) Shirt shoots. Underwear shoots. And now a shoot for the American version of a magazine on which he’s appeared on the cover in several other countries.
He arrives at the secure drive, parks beside a fountain lit like a Vegas pool party, and walks to the front door while handlers gathering inside scream for the proper people to “receive him.” He walks up the slate steps and through the front doors and removes his sunglasses. He speaks Portuguese, he speaks Spanish, he speaks English. He shakes hands but doesn’t always meet the eyes attached to them. He has diamonds in his ears.
He meets the Brazilian supermodel with whom he’ll be photographed. Her name is Alessandra Ambrosio. In any other room on any other continent, hers would be the most recognizable face and body. (17) They greet, they kiss, they chat in Portuguese. The sun sets, and the vast grounds of cypress trees and pea gravel go so black it’s like a curtain’s been pulled.
17.Alessandra began modeling at 15 and started walking with Victoria’s Secret in 2000. She is the second-longest-serving Victoria’s Secret Angel, behind only Adriana Lima.
He sits on a velveteen sofa. There are poker chips and playing cards. He is wearing—(18) The photographer asks Cristiano to toss the playing cards. He flicks them like ninja stars at Cristiano Jr. The boy dodges the cards. He’s in stitches. While working his way through the deck, Cristiano arrives at a seven of diamonds and flashes it at Cristiano Jr., smiling and winking. (19)
18. I don’t really remember; it’s all discarded quickly. In many ways, the clothes serve the same purpose as the costumes in Magic Mike—they’re not long for this stage.
19. Seven is Cristiano’s number on Real Madrid and on the Portuguese national team. CR7 is the name of his underwear line and his premium shirts line and his shoe line and his fragrance line (a.k.a. Legacy). He looks for *7’*s everywhere; he feels cosmically entangled with them. Last spring, a team of astronomers led by a Portuguese guy discovered a galaxy and named it CR7. There seems to be a belief that *7’*s exist in the service of CR.
It is evident that, for Cristiano, there isn’t really anyone else in the room but his son. (20) Never mind the two dozen strangers present, all of whom are willing him with their minds to do certain things for the camera—even if it’s just the photographer who’s vocalizing it.
20.For all of Cristiano’s popularity, he operates within a tight circle, even by famous-person standards. He has his mother, his brother, his agent, his manager, a few friends, whomever he’s dating (current rumors say it’s the daughter of his agent—further alarming the in-circle-ness of his orbit), and, of course, his son. In the documentary Ronaldo, he says: “In football, I don’t have a lot of friends. The people who I really trust, there are not many.… Most of the time, I’m alone.”
“Unzip him, Ále!” the photographer shouts. “Lean in! Grab him!” Cristiano Jr. giggles and covers his eyes when Alessandra closes in on his father’s body, rests her head in his lap. Cristiano catches his son gawking at Alessandra: “Te gusta, aye?!”
All this unfolds the way it does in the simulacra of fashion photo shoots, from Blowup to Austin Powers. The photographer yelling, in his Australian accent, “Yeah, baby!” and “It’s your birthday!” and “Sausages!” When the use of props isn’t sufficient, the photographer gestures to the box of poker chips and shouts at Alessandra: “Feed him a chip, baby! He’s hungry! Feed him a chip!”
21.Ále grew up in Erechim, Brazil, but didn’t play soccer seriously. “It was a men’s sport,” she says. “In Brazil, girls just grow up watching soccer. I’d play sometimes on the beach, but never seriously.”
It goes like this for four hours, Cristiano often shirtless, his torso infested with abdominal muscles. There are abs that touch his nipples, abs that reach around to his back and up his neck to his brain. Cristiano’s energy level is high. He seems buoyed by the enthusiasm of the photographer (he races to a mounted laptop after each look to watch the shots download), and he seems to be having a perfectly good and professional time with Alessandra. She speaks Portuguese with Cristiano Jr. between shots, kicking the ball around with staggering skill, (21) considering the heels and bikini approximations she’s outfitted in.
When the shoot wraps, Cristiano paws through the clothing in the dressing room. He can buy everything here, and, without exaggeration, most things anywhere: a Gulfstream G200 jet for $19 million in November, that Greek island for his agent in August, an $18.5 million apartment in New York City’s Trump Tower two weeks after that (which he weirdly denies). And yet sometimes he just likes stuff that’s pre-selected for him. He asks permission and then dumps a couple of pairs of pants and a few watches in a bag. He also selects a shimmering kelly green suit jacket from the rack. He asks the creative director of the shoot if he can keep the jacket, to which he politely cuts off his own question: “If it’s any problem, just let him know,” he says, pointing to his manager, “and it will be taken care of.”
He wears the jacket throughout dinner with Alessandra and Cristiano Jr. in the dining room of the empty house while he makes small talk with the crew. Around eleven fifteen, he shakes my hand for the second time and winks. He selects the seat on the sofa where he’d been four hours earlier (“Feed him a chip, baby! He’s hungry!”), and a crew of handlers (that little dust devil of help he moves through public life with) arrange themselves around the sofa, which is still illuminated by the photo lights, a stage almost.
Cristiano is, at 30, just past the peak of his career. Though he continues to dominate with Real Madrid, many believe he has one last move to make, teamwise. There is hysterical speculation about where that major move could be—new news every day, practically. Some say he wants to return to England—to Manchester United, where his career first reached stratospheric heights. Some say Paris Saint-Germain, which has fashioned itself into the stereotypical model of the “buy high” Yankees. Others suggest MLS, America’s domestic league, where increasingly higher-profile talents (Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, David Villa, Kaká) have landed in recent years. (22)
22.MLS has improved to such an extent that a late-career signing by a 3x Ballon d’Or winner is not the joke it once was.
“I don’t follow the league a hundred percent, but I follow parts,” he says when I mention MLS and the quality of the sport in America. “I know that many players move there. I think it’s becoming better and better. It’s growing. I think it’s good. It’s good for me and young players that maybe one day we want to move there. So it’s good that football—‘soccer’—grows there.…”
“You can’t even say the word without smirking,” I say.
He laughs hard. “No, I mean, what’s happening there is great, it’s fantastic—maybe in the future will be a good chance for me to play there. You never know, but it’s something interesting. I consider it, of course, because as I’ve said, soccer there has become better and better, so why not? I think that this is maybe going to be possible.” (23)
23.In December, David Beckham secured stadium rights for the Miami MLS franchise he’s assembling. This would be a natural fit for CR in a few years. Ronaldo filled the role of Beckham at both Manchester United and Real Madrid, and many feel Beckham to be CR’s only true antecedent. “Plus, I mean,” Alexi Lalas says, “when you say, ‘Cristiano Ronaldo South Beach,’ nobody bats an eye.”
To date, the casual American soccer fan’s most recallable encounter with Cristiano was likely the USA-Portugal match during the 2014 World Cup. After falling behind 1–0, the U.S. outplayed the higher-ranked Portuguese and rallied to a 2–1 lead that was all but sealed until a superhuman play by CR7, the kind of play that former American-national-team star and current Fox Sports analyst Alexi Lalas means when he says, “He is the kind of athlete, few and far between, that when the ball is near them, there is a recognition based on history that something magical can happen.”
With seconds remaining in the match, Cristiano was fed a ball on the right flank of the field (his weaker side) and, in an instant less than it took to figure out what he’d done, whipped the ball behind the American defensive line toward a streaking Portuguese teammate, on a collision course with the teammate’s head and the back of the net. It was the closest thing you get in soccer to a half-court buzzer beater. The game ended moments later, 2–2, and the draw played a part in preventing the Americans from winning the group (and potentially advancing further in the tournament).
That moment was late mid-career for Cristiano. Americans were being exposed to the legend at the height of his heat. But in that match, we saw both the extraordinary and the deplorable—the flash of brilliance but also the sour-faced complainer rolling around in the grass, faking injury: the very behavior that many Americans who haven’t taken the bait for soccer point to when conveying their distaste.
Whereas Messi is more even-keeled and robotic in emotion, Cristiano is an exposed nerve. (“Having that juxtaposition between that superhero image with these very raw, very human type of reactions is something that sets him apart,” Lalas says.) And whereas Messi, as Spanish writer Manuel Vicent once described him, “subscribes to Einstein’s theory” that the shortest distance between two points is a curve, “Cristiano subscribes to Euclid: that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line—a line down which he blasts at warp speed.”
Cristiano describes himself as “a very direct player. I like to run at defenders with the ball, and I like to score goals.”
I like to score goals.
It is so simple it sounds dumb. And yet it’s the cleanest articulation of his essence—almost like a company’s core-value statement. He has scored more than anyone in the history of Real Madrid—324 goals in his first 310 appearances. He became the first player to score against every team in the league in a single season. He scored five goals in a single game last April. And then he did it again in September. These are unfathomable feats. And yet there is no doubt in his mind that they are surmountable. “I see myself as the best footballer in the world,” he tells me. “If you don’t believe you are the best, then you will never achieve all that you are capable of. Last season was one of my best. I scored 66 goals in one season, which is unique in our sport. But this year I’m hoping to score more.… When you don’t expect is the moment when you score.”
When you don’t expect is the moment when you score.
It’s like a koan that distracts one into a logic of infinite regress—a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror.
“Six goals in a game?” he continues. “As I say, nothing is impossible. Why not? I hope one day to score six goals.”
I ask him a question to which I’m sure I already know the boilerplate reply: What was the most important game of your career?
Any player, particularly one as media-pummeled as the most famous athlete in the world, would answer this question by describing his two most significant team victories—the 2008 Champions League title with Manchester United and the 2014 Champions League title with Real Madrid (a.k.a. La Décima, the club’s elusive tenth European championship).
Cristiano makes that Continental pffffsshh sound, meaning That’s a tough one to decide on the spot. Which makes me all the more convinced I know what’s coming.
“Mmm, when I score five goals.”
I smile. “Really? Those two games more than a Champions League final or something?” Not the team victories over the solo accomplishments?
“Well…it’s different, because the most important is the last one. Of course, Champions League was special, of course. When you score in the final, when you win the competition, it is the most special ones.”
He re-rails. Drifts back to the party line. But for that brief instant, I believe we (remember, there’s a coven of handlers listening in) glimpsed the truest version of CR7—an athlete devoted with uncompromising commitment to bettering himself in the service of his team but also (foremost) in the service of Cristiano.
I ask a hypothetical: If you were presented with a bargain for Real Madrid to win out this season but you couldn’t score another goal, would you do it?
He does that thing again, the pffffsshh, and nearly walks into the same mess. Only this time he recognizes that this isn’t a real thing that could happen—there’s no Faustian devil waiting to take his goal-scoring prowess away.
“It would be weird, because we just started the league,” he says. “But: Of course, because if this happens, it’s good, because we win something. So I will sign that. I will sign on that.”
It is very nearly midnight, the million-dollar day coming to its close. Because Cristiano lives just a minute away and tomorrow isn’t a match day, he seems not terribly concerned about getting out the door. He takes a picture with Alessandra, a picture he posts to Instagram, a picture in which his eyes and mouth are so much this side of authentic that it catalyzes a whole new round of dating rumors. He and the handlers sweep around the living room one final time, taking selfies with assistants and signing soccer balls, all before emptying through the front door like bathwater down the drain, out onto the landing and into the Rolls-Royce waiting like a midnight carriage to deliver him home.
Which is when it boomerangs back to me, glowing this time, Ronaldo’s first answer to the first question I asked him about this day, this exceptional, extraordinary, Brazilian-model-stuffed, Ducati-straddled, tan-line-exposing, soccer-plus-filled day. I had asked him to describe it, to characterize it as best he could, to place it in context on the spectrum of all days ever for Cristiano Ronaldo.
“Normal day,” he’d said, doing the pffffsshh. “Normal day.”
Daniel Riley is GQ’s senior editor.