Ronaldo, the Brazilian goal scorer, has accomplished far more as a player than David Beckham ever could. History, and the record books, will confirm that unequivocally.
Yet Ronaldo's parting from Real Madrid was completed Tuesday with nothing like the trumpeting that sounded across the Atlantic when Beckham pledged his future to Hollywood last month. The reason for this might tell us more about ourselves than the two individuals involved: We have been sucked into the age of cult worship.
It would fill a page to list Ronaldo's achievements. They include scoring more goals at World Cup tournaments than any other man. They encompass trophies with every team he has played for. In athletic appeal, Ronaldo has had few equals as a performer who could finish contests through pace, power and an instinct to be in the right place at the right moment to fire shots from either foot into spaces that others might never know exist.
Alas, Beckham, for all the publicity generated by his looks, is a relatively blank page as a performer.
He did once figure in Manchester United's domination in England, but after he joined the Madrid "galacticos," his limitations were exposed.
We should end the comparison there.
This week, after Ronaldo had perhaps surprisingly satisfied Milan's doctors of his fitness, his move from Madrid to AC Milan rested on hours and hours of bartering at the Bernabeu. "Only €1 million separates us," Adriano Galliani, the AC Milan vice president, said Sunday. Referring to the club's coach, he said, "I'm expecting to be back in Milan on Tuesday morning with Ronaldo to place at Carlo Ancelotti's disposal in the afternoon."
In fact it was tea time before Ramón Calderón, Real Madrid's lawyer-president, accepted €7.5 million, or about $9.7 million, plus the loan of the Milan striker Ricardo Oliveira until the end of the season. Madrid had wanted money up front; Milan offered payments by installment.
To put it bluntly, Madrid haggled over what its coach, Fabio Capello, judged to be the remnants of Ronaldo's greatness. Ancelotti, whose team has lacked goal power since last summer's sale of Andriy Shevchenko, still thinks there is life in Ronaldo's shooting boots.
Milan's bid represents less than half what it offered six months ago after Chelsea had paid the Italian club $57 million for Shevchenko, another 30- year-old whose form is not what it was when he was younger.
Every transfer is a gamble. Capello's priority since he quit Juventus to return to Madrid, where he had coached before, is clearing out underachieving old stars and replacing them with new, younger and mostly Latin American players.
The exception is Ruud van Nistelrooy, the Dutchman who was sold by Manchester United. Where Alex Ferguson, United's manager, deemed the Dutchman past his best, Capello saw him as a straight replacement for Ronaldo. Once again, comparisons between van Nistelrooy and Ronaldo, at the highest level of the international game, heavily favor Ronaldo.
In each of his clubs — from Cruzeiro in his native Rio de Janeiro, to PSV Eindhoven, to Barcelona, then Inter Milan and Real Madrid — Ronaldo has delivered goals at a phenomenal ratio approaching one for every single performance.
Yes, age is knocking on his door. He is 30 now, and possibly a worn 30 because of the serious battering his knees and ankles have taken over the decade and a half that took him from the streets to the citadels of soccer.
I do not question Capello's judgment or his purpose. He said from the start of his second spell at the Bernabeu that Ronaldo was overweight and undercommitted — in terms of the almost demonic physical demands this coach places on players.
Ancelotti looks at it through different eyes. "Ronaldo is not fat," he said over the weekend. "He is a very robust player. I think his problem is that, in recent times, he has not had much motivation. From a physical point of view, he hasn't trained much because he has been excluded from Real Madrid's team, and has lost motivation in training. But he remains a great player. In the last five years at Real, he scored almost 100 goals. No one in the world has done that."
Everyone has their opinion. Kaká, the much younger Brazilian at AC Milan, spoke with telling insight when he said of Ronaldo to Italian reporters: "He can be decisive, even without the kind of runs he used to make."
Used to. But think back to the year 2000, to when Ronaldo was flat on his back and his career was for 20 months in the hands of surgeons, written off by Brazilian insiders and the mass media.
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