Why watching Cristiano Ronaldo has become painful, even for a Ronaldo fan

Cristiano Ronaldo’s career can be summed up in two pictures. No, not the five Ballon d’Or or Champions Leagues he won. Both pictures are from different World Cups, captured just before the zenith and after the most difficult point of his career.The first is from the 2006 World Cup and the second is from the 2026 World Cup. The first will make him glance at the bench, a nonchalant upstart who would go on to dominate the game. He saw him in tears, perhaps unable to understand that he was no longer the player he used to be. Between those two moments, we saw a player who craved greatness, rewrote records, transcended the game, and ended up unable to distinguish between reality and his illusions.But let’s take a walk down memory lane.In 2006, England faced Portugal in a wild encounter in which Ronaldo’s Manchester United team-mate Wayne Rooney was sent off for setting foot on the wrong ball. Ronaldo, a proud Portuguese, demanded Rooney be sent off to the referee and then became England’s public enemy number 1 by winking at the bench.The English rag-tags, as usual, lost their rags and called for Ronaldo’s head, but Sir Alex Ferguson used the moment to create the siege mentality that led to his third great United side, with Rooney and Ronaldo at the core.This moment also spurred Ronaldo to become the player we know today. While the statisticians will prefer the 2007-08 version, when he plundered 42 goals in a single season that ended with United winning the Premier League and the Champions League, the purists prefer the 2006-07 version, when he was the perfect amalgamation of the touch and tease teenager and the goalscoring beast he became. Before then, most dribblers were relegated to the Premier League redundancy bin as people who couldn’t do it on a cold Stoke night.Everyone knows what happened next.Ronaldo left rainy Manchester for steamy Madrid, became the most expensive player in history and became the foundation on which Real Madrid built their new Galacticos, winning four Champions League titles during his tenure. His footballing rivalry with Lionel Messi defined the game for the better part of a decade, but even at Real, Ronaldo’s sphere of influence was waning. The marauding winger made fewer and fewer meandering runs, instead becoming a player who focused on just one aspect of football: scoring goals. With age, this ball shrunk to the point that by the time the 2026 World Cup rolled around, it was just a penalty spot.A journey that began in disbelief ended pitifully. Ronaldo tried to keep a brave face through it all, channeling his inner Sinatra to claim he left with a “clear conscience”, that he had won three titles with Portugal and that Portugal had never won a “big trophy before Cristiano”. It sounded more like a man trying to convince himself than an observer. Of course, purists would point out that in the Euro 2016 final, Ronaldo was injured and didn’t even play when Portugal took the lead. And the jury is still out on whether two Nations League titles, a tournament designed to give some weight to celebrated friendlies, qualifies as “major”.Perhaps Ronaldo’s rise and fall is particularly personal because of the age similarities. When a fan is almost the same age as a football player, even if it is a few years, their destinies almost become intertwined.In 2003, the talk of every United forum was a new signing from Sporting Lisbon, a kid called Cristiano. It was even startling to find out that Ronaldo in his name comes from the US President rather than Brazil’s Il Fenomeno. We’re told he gave John O’Shea a migraine when Sporting Lisbon played Manchester United in a pre-season friendly and Sir Alex refused to leave before signing him, meaning United’s players were forced to spend several extra hours on the bus. One vividly remembers his debut when he came on against Bolton wearing the famous number 7, abandoned by David Beckham after boots started flying in the dressing room. Who did the guy think he was? How could he wear the number worn by George Best, Eric Cantona and Becks?In the 61st minute he came on for Nicky Butt, a teenager with scruffy teeth and horrible looking hair. By the time the match was over, no one dared question whether he deserved to wear the shirt. As George Best said: “It was undoubtedly the most exciting debut I have ever seen. There have been players who have some similarities (with me) but this lad has more than anyone else, especially as he is truly two-footed. He can play on either wing, beat players with ease and deliver dangerous crosses with the left or right pin. When was the last time you saw that?”He spent six years there, winning three league titles, two League Cups, the FA Cup, the Club World Cup and the Champions League. During his prime, he looked like an amalgamation of several Premier League greats: a man who can head like Shearer, curl the ball like Henry, score from free-kicks like Beckham (albeit in a different style) and beat defenders like Ginola.Ronaldo returned to Old Trafford 12 years later and the highlight of his stay was Peter Drury’s comment: “A walking work of art, vintage, beyond appreciation, beyond forgery or imitation. CR7 reunited.” Sadly, that was as good as it got for Ronaldo, as it turned out that while he still had the ability to score goals, his presence often left the team lopsided. Results turned south and Ronaldo’s old team-mate Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who had played United’s best attacking football since Sir Alex Ferguson left, was eventually dropped. Ronaldo ended up tearing up his contract after he gave a Roy Keane-esque interview about the club and headed to Saudi Arabia, where even the local laws were bent on his will, allowing him to stay with his unmarried lover. By the time the World Cup came around, in addition to Ronaldo’s tough stances like iShowSpeed ​​​​and Piers Morgan, it became clear that no matter how much the spirit was willing, the body disappeared.One meme summed up the mismatch between Ronaldo’s ability and his reality, mocking the state of the Golden Boot Race: Messi (7), Mbappe (7), Haaland (7) and CR7.Perhaps the comparison with Messi made the difference more pronounced. Messi, only a few years younger, plays with more freedom than before and lifts his teammates. Ronaldo, on the other hand, feels like an albatross around his team’s neck. Now, we must point out that while Ronaldo and Messi played for similarly strong teams during the Real Madrid and Barcelona eras, Argentina has always been a much better footballing nation compared to Portugal. Messi has always been surrounded by better world class players. The purest analogy comes from cricket: Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar were also talked about in the same breath, but the West Indies never had a team that stood up to the ODI World Cup like India, even though they eventually became T20 beasts.Either way, when it came to Ronaldo, the numbers weren’t even the most painful part. Ronaldo kept shooting, still running, still doing the familiar little jumps before a free-kick, still raising his hands when the pass didn’t arrive, still looking at the referee as if the game owed him one last favor. But the body no longer submitted to mythology. The jump wasn’t there. Half the yard wasn’t there. Conspicuously missing was the sharpness inside the box, that terrifying certainty of turning any loose ball into a funeral procession of defenders. It was impossible to ignore against Spain. Portugal carried the idea of ​​Ronaldo more than Ronaldo himself. Every attack seemed to reach him a second late or leave him a second early. The man who once bent entire defenses out of shape was now waiting for the play to come to him. And when it did, it no longer came with the old inevitability. At the last moment, when someone jumped, it was the 5-foot-8 Bernardo Silva instead of the 6-foot-1 Cristiano Ronaldo.Maybe that’s why the tears were so violent. They were not the tears of a man raging against a dying light. They were the tears of an old man who cannot understand that the world no longer bends to his will, that it is now indifferent to his whims.And it’s a tough watch for a fan. It’s easy to mock the vanity, the tantrums, the conversations, the fanboys, the endless need to remind everyone of their own greatness. But it’s harder to watch the player who made you fall in love with football fads become a tribute to himself. In some ways, it resembles Dhoni’s post-2019 World Cup funk in the Indian Premier League, another man who, like Voldemort, worships at the altar of number seven.In 2006, the wink heralded a new era of world domination. The tears in 2026 were the end of this mirage. And for those of us who grew up with him, who hated him, loved him, defended him, mocked him and still secretly wanted that last dive at the back post, it was painful because we no longer watched Ronaldo lose to Spain. We watched Ronaldo waste time.