LM: Ronaldinho
The one thing people seem to forget about the Beautiful Game, is that life itself is also beautiful. For some, that means the idyllic stillness of the soul that they find looking out at the world’s great natural wonders. For others, it’s the sight of their children going from learning to walk to walking down the aisle in the relative blink of an eye.
For Ronaldinho, it’s drinking champagne in a hot tub while nuzzling up to 5 Brazilian women with arse implants. It’s rolling into training direct from a Milanese nightclub before the biggest game of the season. It’s moving into a marble-floored mansion with your two supermodel fiances, only for the throuple to break down because you casually mention you’re shagging a third woman.
Now, imagine doing all that and still making the defenders of La Liga, Serie A, and Ligue 1 look like hired clowns for the better part of a decade. The very personification of work hard, play harder.
The no-look passes, the flip-flaps, the endless mazy runs and venomous 30-yard bangers; there has simply been no player before or hence that has shown you football, or life, the way Ronaldo de Assis Moreira did. And while it’s easy to look back at his time at Barcelona and find the enduring moment that best surmises him - the stunning debut goal, the standing ovation at the Bernabeu, whatever you call that no-backlift finish against Chelsea - there’s perhaps a game you haven’t seen that does it best.
Imprisoned in Paraguay for attempting to enter the country on a fake passport (Paraguay, incidentally, not a country you even need a passport to enter from Brazil), Ronaldinho was asked to take part in the upcoming match between the inmates. His team won 11-2, with the man himself not just scoring 5, but assisting the other 6.
It’s unknown what football team the 18th-century English poet John Keats supported, but when he said “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”, this is surely what he meant.
Adam Clery
