There have never been so many people wanting to enter the little one Heidewaldstadion, which usually hosts the German fourth division matches of a team from Rhineland-Westphalia, Gütersloh, famous mainly for its rye bread and spiced raw ham. Last Friday 14 June, however, the training of the Portuguese national team, here, where they set up their retreat for the European football championship in Germany, was under attack: UEFA had made six thousand tickets available (free), eight thousand showed up and over fifty thousand had applied (to the delight of the touts who apparently sold the coveted tickets for up to a thousand euros). All the enthusiasm for Portugal is by extension the enthusiasm for Cristiano Ronaldo that, a 39 years old completed last February 5th, will play his sixth European football championship. While on the one hand it is clear that CR7 both at the end of his career, and this distributes the pressure more evenly on the rest of Portugal – who are among the favorites of the tournament, and not only for Ronaldo -, on the other hand the wait to see the last great participation of Cristiano Ronaldo in one of the competitions in which he has historically done best: the European Championship.
In 2016, in France, Cristiano Ronaldo became the first to score in four consecutive European Championships: in 2004 (two goals against Greece and the Netherlands), in 2008 (against the Czech Republic), in 2012 (two goals against the Netherlands, one against the Czech Republic), and now he scored a brace against Hungary and decided the semi-final against former teammate Bale’s Wales with a goal and an assist. Paradoxically, Ronaldo played only seven balls of the final which Portugal won anyway, without him, with the unexpected goal of the striker Éder. A constant, some said: in 2019 Portugal won the Nations League, but with a decisive goal from Gonçalo Guedes. On the other hand, if anything, Cristiano Ronaldo had lost his first final against Greece, at nineteen years and one hundred and fifty daysat the 2004 European Championship in which he scored his first goal with the Portuguese national team against Greece (in the group stage), on June 12, 2004. Were you to score at Euro2024, and maybe already tonight, then you would be writing a twenty-year-long story at a time. With the Portugal shirt, Ronaldo scored one hundred and thirty goalsthe last two of which arrived last June 11th, in the last friendly before the European Championship, won 3-0 – also a goal by João Félix – against Ireland, at nineteen years and three hundred and sixty-five days since that first goal, in 2004.
Cristiano Ronaldo he has already broken a whole slew of records. And the best scorer of his team (130 goals) and of a national football team in general (more than Messi’s 108 goals and Ali Daei’s 109). He is the best scorer in the history of the European Championship, with 14 goals. He is the best scorer in the history of the Champions League, with 140. Recently, he also became the best scorer in a single season in the history of the Saudi championship: thirty-five goals. His next record to break could make him the footballer with more assists in the history of the European Championship – CR7 he is at seven, one less than the Czech Poborský, between 1996 and 2004 – even if Cristiano Ronaldo he is the footballer more decisive ever of the tournament: twenty-one goals and assists, more than double those who follow him in the standings, namely Griezmann (7 goals and 3 assists), the aforementioned Poborský (2 goals and 8 assists) and the various Platini and Ibrahimović, Klinsmann and Schweinsteiger , Berkgamp and van Basten, Fàbregas and David Silva, further back. He’s the captain, he is oh best of worldis the star of a country that clings – still – to him, of which Ronaldo was captain for the first timeborn at twenty-two and with whom Ronaldo has already played five European Championships and as many World Cups.
On the occasion of the 2018 World Cup, a study by Soccerment ruled that Cristiano Ronaldo – thirty-three years old at the time – guaranteed better performances than those of a twenty-five year old athlete. A few weeks earlier, Ronaldo himself had declared that he had «a biological age of 23 years» and to be able «play up to 41 years old». A journalist from Deportes Cope, Arancha Rodríguez, had calculated a fat mass of 7% and a muscle mass of 50%, against averages of 10/11% and 45/46% respectively. If the data that matters most concern performance, however, before February 5, 2015 (i.e., before the age of thirty) Ronaldo signed fifty-two goals and thirty-one assists in 118 games. Since, then, he scored seventy-eight goals and provided fifteen assists in 89 games. After the elimination in the quarterfinals of the 2022 World Cup, with Morocco, it seemed that at thirty-seven he was out of the national team. The farewell of coach Fernando Santos, the arrival of Roberto Martínez in 2023 and Ronaldo’s transfer to Saudi Arabia, at Al-Nassr, have changed things. Not only did Portugal qualify for the European Championship, but they did so by winning ten out of ten games, with ten goals from Ronaldo. From winger to center forward, he will now have the competition of Gonçalo Ramos, but also the same proverbial security of his own means: «It is no coincidence that I’ve been playing at the highest level for twenty years».
Cristiano Ronaldo: Intimate story of a global myth (Italian Edition)
Born in 1997, Genoese and Genoese (also not in this order), he studied in Savona ranging between journalism and SEO. He has written and writes among others for La Gazzetta dello Sport, Rivista Undici, PianetaGenoa1893.net and Cronache di Spogliatoio. In 2018 he published ‘Narrami, o Dellas’, a book about Greece, winner of the 2004 European football championship. So far only football, but there is more: electronic music playlists, biographies, a genuine obsession with IKEA and Scandinavian stories.
