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Sunday 16 April 2017

Cristiano Ronaldo’s Son Keeps Getting Picked On At School Because Of His Superstar Dad

Cristiano Ronaldo’s Son Keeps Getting Picked On At School Because Of His Superstar Dad
Those of us who were bullied as kids know some hard truths that not everyone else understands. First, literally anything that’s part of who you are is fair game; if you got picked on for one thing in school, and you somehow took away that reason, bullies would just find something else. That’s because bullying is, above all else, an exercise in power. And second, any source of strength or pride for you can be easily held up as a deficiency and mark you as a target. Because, again, it’s about power.
With that in mind: per his dad, Cristiano Ronaldo’s son is apparently getting hassled by his classmates because of his famous, Ballon d’Or-winning footballer pops.
The senior Ronaldo mentioned this somewhat off-handedly in an interview with Egyptian television Xbox One Games. CR7 brought it up as an anecdote for how much his son is just like him— including how to deal with The Haters.
”There are people who sometimes say to him that ‘there is another player who is better than your father’, but he knows how to deal with that. He is a smart boy, like me. I often tell him ‘be yourself and be polite.’I know that he will go through periods of adversity as there are jealous people out there, but I see him as a happy child.”
On the one hand, it wouldn’t be entirely out of character for Ronaldo to embellish a story like this in order to talk himself up to the press. On the other hand, kids can be pretty mean, and it’s not that hard to picture the younger Ronaldo’s classmates chanting “Messi” at him during recess.
Ronaldo also mentioned that he’s nudging his kid ever-so-gently toward being a footballer when he grows up.
”Of course I would like it if he became a footballer. I know that it is a challenge and that it isn’t easy, but he can be whatever he wants to be as I won’t pressure him. I might be pushing him a little in the direction of becoming a footballer, but not to be a goalkeeper as I want him to be a forward!”
I wonder what his thing against goalkeepers is about.

Monday 18 April 2016

A Bad 2015? CR7 Still Scores A Goal A Game

Despite the general consensus that Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo has had a poor year, the Portuguese superstar has maintained a fantastic goalscoring record.

The 30-year-old completed 2015 with a brace in Los Blancos' victory over Real Sociedad on Wednesday to take his goalscoring average to a goal a game, having netted 57 times in 57 matches.

There is no denying that Ronaldo has not been at his best in 2015, while Real Madrid failed to win any silverware and were completely outshone by eternal rivals FC Barcelona, who won five trophies, including the treble.

The strike partnership of Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar has been lethal this year, and helped the Catalans overtake Real's record for the most goals in a calendar year.

However, Messi and Suarez, with 48 strikes each, finished 2015 nine goals off of Ronaldo's final tally, while Neymar managed 41 goals.

The Portugal captain is also the joint second highest goalscorer in La Liga this season so far, along with Neymar, having scored 14 times.

He also scored 11 goals in six Champions League group stage matches, another record.

So while Ronaldo will be disappointed with his performances in 2015, and Lionel Messi remains favourite to win the Ballon d'Or, there is no questioning that the Santiago Bernabeu man's eye for goal is as good as ever.

Cristiano Ronaldo got nutmegged by a defender twice in 6 seconds

This is a rare thing. It's like seeing a panther in the wild, or finding someone who saw Batman vs. Superman and actually liked it. Yes, dear readers, this is Cristiano Ronaldo getting made a fool of.

Okay, so before you Ronaldo fans get all angry: Yes, Real Madrid won totally and completely. They dominated Eibar 4-0 and no, this isn't some condemnation of Cristiano or saying Gonzalo Escalante is better. What this is, however, is a moment frozen in time for us to all see. Ronaldo is human. He can look weak when Messi isn't on the field.

Appreciate how rare this is and don't get caught up in the rest. Dude got nutmegged, just like he's done 1,000 times before to hapless opponents. Let's just enjoy it.

Tuesday 2 February 2016

Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo scores hat-trick in demolition of Espanyol


Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo celebrates his second goal in the 6-0 win against Espanyol. Photograph: Juan Medina/Reuters

Cristiano Ronaldo hit yet another hat-trick for Real Madrid who swept aside Espanyol 6-0 in a ruthless attacking display in La Liga on Sunday.

The Portuguese forward led the way as Real sought to keep in the title chase after an inconsistent season that still leaves them in third place, four points behind the leaders, Barcelona.

Karim Benzema headed in a whipped cross from James Rodríguez after seven minutes and then Ronaldo won and struck home a penalty.

A James strike was deflected in after 16 minutes and Ronaldo showed a sublime touch to beat two players and curl a 20-yard shot into the corner before half-time.

Ronaldo headed in his third from close range after 82 minutes and Espanyol’s misery was complete with an own-goal from Oscar Duarte.

Sportblog Cristiano Ronaldo film captures giant ego and strange, lonely world of being CR7

Ronaldo’s rivalry with Messi and extraordinary self-regard are to the fore in this vanity project but the suffering his success has brought his mother and the forward’s sheer competitive drive also catch the eye

 

Cristiano Ronaldo describes his agent, Jorge Mendes, as ‘the best, the Cristiano Ronaldo of agents’. Photograph: Ariel Grandoli/Universal Pictures International

As a snapshot of what life must be like for Cristiano Ronaldo, there is one clip in the new film Ronaldo when his godson is being baptised and there is a small gathering around the font. The baby’s head has just been wet when the priest looks over to the tanned guy with the gelled hair and whips out a mobile phone. “Any chance of a quick selfie?” he wants to know.

Then there is the moment Portugal’s team are training at Estádio Moisés Lucarelli in São Paulo during the last World Cup and a sobbing girl breaks the cordon to run across the pitch in a desperate attempt to reach her hero. She is shaking, crying, close to hysteria and caught by one of the security guards. It is The Beatles at Shea Stadium all over again. Ronaldo hugs her and she looks as if she might pass out. “He knows I exist,” she wails, when a television reporter stops her a few moments later. What did he say? “He asked me to stay calm and stop crying.” And what did you say back? “I asked him to follow me on Twitter.”

It must be suffocating at times even if, for the most part, Ronaldo gives the impression that fame is his comfort blanket. The film is a remarkable vanity project and, even more than before, it is difficult not to come away with the feeling that Ronaldo must shout his own name during sex. He and his agent, Jorge Mendes, appear to have a relationship of mutual worship. Mendes, Ronaldo says, is “the best, the Cristiano Ronaldo of agents” and it is difficult to keep count of the number of times they get lost in each other’s eyes, reminding one another of their success and wealth and shiny brilliance.

Mendes – sharp black suit, Rolex, phone almost permanently to his ear – seems almost as hung up about Ronaldo winning the Ballon d’Or as CR7 himself. It is a 24-7, twitching obsession, on both their parts, given far more relevance throughout the film than Real Madrid’s Décima or anything else, and it is a telling moment when Mendes and one of his associates can be heard muttering darkly from one of the Bernabéu’s executive boxes about the possibility “the other guy might destroy everything”.

That other guy is Lionel Messi, cast in a slightly villainous Ivan Drago-style role that he probably does not deserve. “It’s a card inside an envelope that can change so much,” Ronaldo says of the Ballon d’Or, describing what it is like being expected to fake a smile on behalf of his old adversary. “To seeMessi win four in a row was difficult for me. After he won the second and third I thought to myself: ‘I’m not coming here again.’” Watching this film, it becomes clear just how difficult it must be for Gareth Bale, signing for Madrid as the most expensive player in history, to deal with that planet-sized ego.

Other scenes are strategically laced with soft-focus Hello! magazine-style moments where Ronaldo can be seen playing with his son, Cristiano Jr, or dropping him off at school, but there is not always a great deal of charm elsewhere. Muhammad Ali and Brian Clough had great humour to go with all the braggadocio. Ronaldo’s style is not so attractive. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he says, explaining why he went to the World Cup with an injury. “If we had two or three Cristiano Ronaldos in the team I would feel more comfortable. But we don’t.”

A touch of humility every now and then would make Ronaldo much more appealing. Equally, he is as good as he is because of the way he is and a documentary of this nature, filmed over 14 months in his company, does show the enormous strains that come with the territory.
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At one point his mother, Dolores, is filmed inside a chemist’s handing in a prescription for sedatives because she can barely take the stress of watching him play. Ronaldo rings and asks if she has taken her tranquillisers yet, as if he is quite used to it. “Its quite complicated to be the mother of a player who needs to win,” Dolores explains. “I suffer a lot.” When he is playing in the World Cup she asks for her flip-flops and then walks up the hill rather than watch with the rest of the family.

It is this insight into the inner circle that reminds us it has not been straightforward for Ronaldo, and not just because of the fact he left his family in Madeira at the age of 12 to join Sporting Lisbon, with his first pimples on his forehead and braces on his teeth. Hugo, his older brother, now runs Museu CR7, the Ronaldo museum, in Funchal but, at 20, was spiralling into alcoholism. Hugo says it could have been him who played football. Instead, he worked in construction, and he says everyone drank in that game, particularly as he was used to seeing his father, Dinis, knocking it back every night. It isn’t in the film but Dinis and Hugo resorted to selling Ronaldo’s Manchester United shirts so they could pay for more booze.

Dinis, we learn, was never the same after being called up to fight in the Portuguese colonial war in Angola. He came back “very angry”, Dolores explains. His head was filled with images of the war and though she says he always cared for his children she also says she became “his victim”. Dinis drank himself into an early grave, dying in 2005 when Ronaldo was 19. “He was drunk nearly every day and when that happens it became hard to have a conversation,” his younger son recalls. “I didn’t get to know my father for real.”

As for Cristiano Jr, possibly the star of the film, Ronaldo explains that he always wanted “my successor” without going into any other details. His son is five, already doing sit-ups and still working on his pronunciation of “Lamborghini”, and Dolores takes care of him while Ronaldo is away. The mother? It’s anyone’s guess. “People speculate that it was with this girl or the other or a surrogate mother,” Ronaldo says. “I’ve never told anybody and I never will.” How a man in his position has managed to keep it secret is remarkable and, unorthodox as it might be, fair play to him.

Cristiano Ronaldo talks of his pain at seeing Lionel Messi win the Ballon d’Or four times in a row: ‘After he won the second and third I thought to myself: I’m not coming here again.’ Photograph: Action Press/Rex

These parts are fascinating and, at times, Ronaldo comes across as so lonely it is a good job he enjoys his own company so much. “In football I don’t have a lot of friends. People I really trust? Not many. Most of the time I’m alone. I consider myself an isolated person.” It pains him that his father is not around to see his success but Mendes, he says, is like a father and a brother rolled into one. InGuillem Balagué’s new book about Ronaldo he writes how, to feed the competitive beast, the player’s entourage quickly came to realise “they must keep criticism at a distance, or control it, create the narrative and keep him on his pedestal”. Mendes is always there to fluff that ego and tell him he is better than Messi, and everybody else. It is far more than just the usual player-agent relationship.

Here, too, is the revelation that there was very nearly no Cristiano Ronaldo either. “He was an unwanted child,” Dolores explains. She considered an abortion and, on a neighbour’s advice, drank boiled black beer before running until she was on the verge of fainting, hoping to force a miscarriage. It didn’t work – and she seems pretty happy about that.

Thirty years on, the film – released on Monday and put together by the people behind Senna – does at least help us understand Ronaldo some more and the incredible drive that is needed to reach the top of his profession. It is not Ronaldo’s talent that stands out the most. It is his competitive courage, his absolute refusal to believe anyone can possibly outdo him and a level of self-obsession that makes one wonder how he will cope now he is approaching the age – two years older than Messi – when the powers gradually start to decline.

In recent years, he says, he and Messi have started talking to one another in a way they never did previously, asking about each other’s families and other polite small-talk. “I’ve started seeing him as a person, not a rival,” he says. “But we are always busting our balls to see who is better.”

Friday 25 December 2015

Amid World Cup Fever, Cristiano Ronaldo Tops Twitter in Asia


Portuguese national soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo in action during an open training session with 8,000 people in the stands, at Moises Lucarelli Stadium in Campinas, Brazil, on June 12.
 
European Pressphoto Agency
Portugal may not emerge from the 2014 World Cup victorious, but the team’s star captain Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the world’s best – and legendarily egotistical – soccer players can take comfort in knowing he is already the most-tweeted player at the tournament among fans in several Asia-Pacific markets.
Mr. Ronaldo, who has 26.7 million Twitter TWTR +1.32% followers – many of them in Asia – was mentioned in the region by name and Twitter handle, @Cristiano, more times than any other player participating in the World Cup, according to data compiled by the social media platform between Jan. 1 and June 6.
The countries surveyed include Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea.
Across the Asia-Pacific region, Ronaldo beat out fellow Real Madrid and Portugal teammate Pepe (second most tweeted); England’s Manchester United MANU +1.66% star Wayne Rooney (third); Luis Suarez, a standout for Liverpool playing for Uruguay in the World Cup (fourth); and Chelsea midfielder Eden Hazard, who is playing for Belgium (fifth).
Rounding out the top 10 most tweeted players were David Luis (Brazil and Chelsea), Sergio Ramos (Spain and Real Madrid), Nani (Portugal and Manchester United), Mesut Ozil (Germany and Arsenal) and Diego Forlan (Uruguay and Cerezo Osaka).
Twitter provided The Wall Street Journal with the rankings, but was unable to provide the numbers of tweets per player.
Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are likely to play a significant role in the way fans watch and follow the action on the field during the month-long sport’s tournament, the world’s biggest.
In a bid to capitalize on global interest, Twitter has launched a special World Cup hub, and users can now tweet using “hashflags,” or hashtags that incorporate World Cup nations’ flags.
Twitter is using the World Cup as a chance to sign up new users, encouraging them to join by declaring their allegiance to a country and picking a pre-made image as their avatar.
Courtesy of Twitter
So, what explains Ronaldo’s Twitter dominance? One factor may be his club team’s global appeal. Real Madrid is one of the world’s most storied outfits, and last month it won European soccer’s crown jewel, the Champions League, with Ronaldo in fine form throughout the season.
Ronaldo also posts frequently on Twitter, often inviting fans to attend games or tweeting photos of himself with teammates – unlike his Argentina and Barcelona nemesis Lionel Messi, who many regard as the world’s top player, with Ronaldo second best.
Twitter’s country-level data also contains some interesting outliers. In India, Manchester United and Netherlands star Robin van Persie is among the top five, perhaps due to the Premier League side’s popularity there. In Australia, Spain’s David Villa is also in the top five – likely because he is set to debut in the coming months for Australian club side Melbourne City.
Meanwhile, the top tweeted player in Japan was Diego Forlan. The Uruguayan, who won the Golden Ball as the best player of the 2010 World Cup, recently joined Japanese side Cerezo Osaka.

Cristiano Ronaldo Portuguese football player



Cristiano Ronaldo, in full Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro (born February 5, 1985, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal), Portuguese football (soccer) forward who was one of the greatest players of his generation.

Ronaldo’s father, José Dinis Aveiro, was the equipment manager for the local club Andorinha. (The name Ronaldo was added to Cristiano’s name in honour of his father’s favourite movie actor, Ronald Reagan, who was U.S. president at the time of Cristiano’s birth.) At age 15 Ronaldo was diagnosed with a heart condition that necessitated surgery, but he was sidelined only briefly and made a full recovery. He first played for Clube Desportivo Nacional of Madeira and then transferred to Sporting Clube de Portugal (known as Sporting Lisbon), where he played for that club’s various youth teams before making his debut on Sporting’s first team in 2002.

A tall player at 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 metres), Ronaldo was a formidable athlete on the pitch. Originally a right-winger, he developed into a forward with a free-reined attacking style. He was able to mesmerize opponents with a sleight of foot that made sufficient space for openings in opposing defenses.

After a successful season with Sporting that brought the young player to the attention of Europe’s biggest football clubs, Ronaldo signed with English powerhouse Manchester United in 2003. He was an instant sensation and soon came to be regarded as one of the best forwards in the game. His finest season with United came in 2007–08, when he scored 42 League and Cup goals and earned the Golden Shoe award as Europe’s leading scorer, with 31 League goals. After helping United to a Champions League title in May 2008, Ronaldo captured Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Player of the Year honours for his stellar 2007–08 season. He also led United to an appearance in the 2009 Champions League final, which they lost to FC Barcelona.

Soon thereafter Ronaldo was sold to Spain’s Real Madrid—a club with which he had long been rumoured to want to play—for a then record £80 million (about $131 million) transfer fee. His scoring prowess continued with his new team, and he netted the most goals (40) in La Liga history during the 2010–11 season (his record was broken the following season by his rival Lionel Messi of Barcelona). In 2011–12 Ronaldo helped Madrid capture a La Liga championship and scored a personal-best 46 goals during the League season. He scored a total of 66 goals in 56 appearances with Madrid and the Portuguese national team in 2013 to earn his second world player of the year award (the FIFA World Player of the Year was renamed the FIFA Ballon d’Or in 2010). In 2014 he scored 52 goals in 43 games and led Madrid to a Champions League title, which resulted in Ronaldo capturing another Ballon d’Or award. In 2014–15 he netted 48 goals to lead La Liga in scoring. Ronaldo netted his 324th goal as a member of Real in October 2015 to become the club’s all-time leading goal scorer.



On his home soil, after moving through the youth and under-21 ranks, Ronaldo had made his first appearance for Portugal’s full national team against Kazakhstan in August 2003 (four days after his debut for United). He was a key player in Portugal’s fourth-place finish at the 2006 World Cup and became the full-time captain of the national team in 2008. In 2012 his stellar play led Portugal to the semifinals of the European Championship, where his team was eliminated by rival Spain in a match that was decided by a penalty kick shoot-out. Ronaldo came into the 2014 World Cup hot off of his second world player of the year win, but his play at the tournament was spotty, and the entire Portugal team struggled during a group-stage elimination.