Why Ronaldo has forsaken flair to focus on finishing

The recent documentary about Cristiano Ronaldo, simply but aptly titled ‘Ronaldo’, told the world very little it didn’t already know about its subject. Unfathomably driven? Check. Ceaselessly self-obsessed? Check. Locked in a mutual and perpetual ego-fondling embrace with Jorge Mendes? Yep.

It’s the first of those character traits, though, that – while the most clichéd and oft-cited of the Portuguese forward – is perhaps the most telling with regards to the fairly curious development of Ronaldo the player.

Like all aspects of Ronaldo’s life, this development has been documented to death: the metamorphosis from a flamboyant, touchline-hugging stepover merchant to today’s dead-eyed mass-producer of goals whose workplace is increasingly just the penalty box.

The one thing reiterated endlessly in ‘Ronaldo’ is that is has been the player’s quest, seemingly since he was a young child, to become not just the world’s best, but the world’s best ever. Again, there’s nothing revelatory here given it’s an ambition that the man himself has always been open about holding. “I want to be the best of all time and I will try and make that happen,” he said just last year.

As a spindly-legged kid kicking pebbles around in Madeira that dream might have seemed rather quixotic, but in 2009, for the Greek god who was transferred to the world biggest football club for an all-time record fee, it probably seemed distinctly realistic. And, funnily enough, it was at this point that the mutation in his playing style properly took hold and his goal tally began to soar accordingly: 18 league goals in his final season at Manchester United became 26 in his first at Real Madrid, and that quickly shot up to 40, 46, and eventually, last season, the faintly ludicrous personal best of 48.

If Ronaldo’s ultimate ambition was suddenly feasible upon joining Madrid, it was only as feasible as a fundamentally unattainable goal could ever be. The pitfall of Ronaldo’s pursuit is that there exists no official recognition for the best ever, and as such the subject is destined to be debated for as long as it’s disagreed over – which is to say: endlessly, forever and always.

It being a wholly subjective field, one’s choice of winner depends on the criteria they themselves put forth. So if someone holds single-handed World Cup wins as the truest measurement, they’ll likely tell you that it’s Diego Maradona atop the pantheon; if visionary and era-birthing innovation is more their thing, it’ll be Johan Cruyff; if they watch football purely to be entertained, they’re perfectly entitled to judge Lee Trundle as the finest to have walked the earth.

Which is all a bit of a pain for a man whose primal ambition leaves no room for such ambiguities. There is, however, one metric which does tend to be cited above all others when attacking players are compared with one another. The most stripped-down yardstick of footballing effectiveness. Goals.

And so perhaps that’s what has propelled this creeping move from all-frills to no-frills, from furnisher to finisher. It’s certainly what would make the most sense. Positional and stylistic remodellings are almost always explained in terms of an injured or ageing body, a la Alan Shearer or Ryan Giggs. But with Ronaldo, this doesn’t hold up: his move to out-and-out goalscorer took effect in his mid-20s, long before any physical decline could have set in (if indeed the term ‘physical decline’ will ever apply to a man who regards his body not so much as a temple but as Mecca, the Sistine Chapel and Notre Dame all rolled into one). Even the explanation of it being a pre-emptive response to his eventual slowing down doesn’t account for the wilful discarding of so much of the flair of his early years.

There have been external forces that have helped him along the way, of course. One of Ronaldo’s earliest successes as a central striker was in 2008, when a storming header was registered at Roma’s Stadio Olimpico en route to Champions League victory. Stationing Ronaldo up front was a ploy Alex Ferguson went on to repeat in most of United’s big fixtures.

And yet at United that was only ever a part-time role, born of tactical necessity. Ronaldo has played under four managers at club level since then and the transformation to full-time goal-poacher has continued steadily throughout. All things considered, it’s hard to see the transition as being driven by anyone but the player himself.

The irony, of course, is that the fixation has led him to abandon the joy and exuberance that got him to the top in the first place. Right now Ronaldo may well be the most efficient attacker who has ever lived, but there’s a sound argument to say he was a better player five years ago. He was certainly a more exciting one. And in an age where legacies are concretised in highlight reels as much as goal tallies (where will history rank Pippo Inzaghi or Ruud van Nistelrooy compared with, say, Ronaldinho?), it’s possible that Ronaldo’s approach may turn out to be somewhat self-defeating.

Much is also down to the sheer misfortune of being born within two years of Saturday’s opponent – Ronaldo’s eternal opponent – Lionel Messi. Somehow the Argentine has managed to have the best of both worlds, scoring unprecedented quantities of goals year on year, but without the Faustian jettisoning of the freewheeling zest of his youth. It’s the capacity to both decorate and dominate that the Team Messi apostles tend to cite as the factor elevating him above the more robotic Ronaldo.

Count closely, though, and you’ll find that in pure goalscoring terms Ronaldo has now overtaken Messi. He has 20 more career league goals to his name and six more at international level. And on a possibly-not-unrelated note, Ronaldo told the BBC earlier this month: "I think the numbers say everything. I don't need to say 'In the history of football, I'm a legend'. The numbers say everything."

Except they don’t. Great sport is judged by the eyes and by the heart, not tallied on an abacus. Which isn’t to say Ronaldo is not a great sportsman. But if his last decade has been a one-man mission to play the numbers game all the way to the top, then the plan has been flawed from day one. Ronaldo set out to become the statistician’s superman – but, as any good statistician will tell you, the numbers only ever tell part of the story.