Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), 1976
Pablo Alabarces
Ronaldo Luiz Nazário de Lima, known worldwide by his first name, or as Ronaldo “Fenômeno” (the Phenomenon), was born into a humble family in the neighborhood of Bento Ribeiro, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. His mother worked fourteen hours a day in pizzerias and supermarkets to raise her three children, as Ronaldo’s father left home when he was thirteen. At that age, the boy almost joined Flamengo, but he didn’t have enough money to pay for the four bus fares needed to get from his home to the club. He started playing for São Cristóvão, and two years later, he was transferred to Cruzeiro, in Minas Gerais. At sixteen, his life took a dramatic turn: his prestige skyrocketed at his new club, and all the teams were vying for him.
Ronaldo debuted with the Brazilian national team at seventeen and became a World Cup champion in 1994, although he didn’t play in any match during the tournament. Soon after, he transferred to PSV in the Netherlands for US$ 6 million, where he played from 1994 to 1996. In that last year, he was named FIFA World Player of the Year. Also in 1996, he signed an eight-year contract with FC Barcelona, for which the Catalan club paid PSV US$ 20 million.
On January 20, 1997, he was once again crowned FIFA World Player of the Year, and in the same year, he won the Ballon d’Or, awarded by the French magazine France Football. In the summer of 1997, even before the season ended, he left Barcelona to join Inter Milan, earning US$ 5 million per year. In 1998, after Romário was cut from the squad, Ronaldo became the key player for the Brazilian national team in the World Cup in France. Despite knee pain and playing in a disorganized team, Ronaldo was Brazil’s top scorer with four goals and was named the best player of the tournament. Before the final against France, an unexplained illness, later diagnosed as a “convulsion,” almost ruled him out of the match, which threw the Brazilian team off balance. They lost 3-0, leading to widespread speculation and rumors.
In the following years, Ronaldo suffered several injuries, some very serious, particularly to his knees. He spent months recovering, and there was speculation that he might never return to the field. Even after recovering from a very serious knee surgery, he continued to have muscle problems in 2001 and needed several months of adaptation to get back to playing. Any doubts about his physical condition and his exceptional talent were definitively put to rest in 2002, at the World Cup in South Korea and Japan, when he regained his status as a star. He was the tournament’s top scorer with eight goals — two of them in the victory over Germany in the final — securing Brazil’s fifth World Cup title (and his second).
His excellent performance put him in the sights of the best clubs in the world, and in August 2002, after weeks of tough negotiations between Inter Milan and Real Madrid, the Spanish team bought the Brazilian player for €45 million. In the last days of the year, Ronaldo received the two most prestigious awards in world football: the Ballon d’Or from France Football for the second time and, for the third time, FIFA’s World Player of the Year award. In the 2006 World Cup in Germany, he scored three more goals, becoming the top scorer in World Cup history with 15 goals — a record that would be broken in 2014 by German Miroslav Klose, who reached 16 goals in total.
