right back for the U.S. who has been wreaking havoc with
his runs up the wings the past month, will likely have to
temper those efforts.
Johnson, who plays in Germany’s Bundesliga, said Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery of Bayern Munich, are
the only players he has faced that he could compare with
Ronaldo.
“Nobody stops these players,” Johnson said. “They will
create chances every game.”
Cristiano Ronaldo:
Soccer’s Perfect Villain
It’s too early to tell who will be the hero of the
2014 World Cup. But one player already is emerging as
the tournament’s favorite antihero and consensus whipping boy: Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese and Real
Madrid superstar striker.
A longtime bête noire of the international soccer
media, Ronaldo routinely gets chastised in the press for
what is perceived to be his arrogance and preening selfregard. Although Ronaldo contends that his confidence is
misconstrued as chest puffing, he seldom misses a chance
to toot his own vuvuzela.
“I don’t think I have to show anyone anything,”
he said at a news conference before Portugal’s opening
match last week against Germany. “Look at my statistics and my CV—I have nothing to prove. My career has
been great so far, and I just want that to continue.”
As a writer for Britain’s Daily Telegraph dryly noted
afterward, “Portugal’s talisman has many qualities, but
modesty is not one of them.”
But after Germany thrashed Portugal 4-0 in Salvador, Bahia, with Ronaldo playing conspicuously subpar, the schadenfreude overflowed from South America
to Europe.
“You lost, playboy,” chortled a front-page headline in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, next to
a photo of a scowling, purse-lipped Ronaldo. “Ron-NILdo,” the German daily Bild cackled, making a pun out of
the striker’s failure to net a single goal.
Even Ronaldo’s fellow Iberians couldn’t resist taking a
whack. “A shadow of himself,” Spain’s El Mundo Deportivo wrote dismissively. Ronaldo also drew stinging
criticism for ripping off his captain’s armband after Germany scored its third goal.
“There has never been a football player so disgusting as Cristiano Ronaldo,” Brazilian journalist Mário
Magalhães fumed in a recent blog post. “He subverts the
noble idea of football as a collective agreement. He represents the climax of our narcissistic times.”
After being routed by Germany, Portugal now faces a
must-win game Sunday against the U.S. in Manaus. Ronaldo reportedly is nursing a bad knee that could threaten
his future career, but his plight is unlikely to elicit much
sympathy beyond the Bay of Biscay.
So why the extreme antipathy? Is it his 21 million
euro salary? His supermodel serial dating? His sculpted
abs, which he never tires of displaying during warmups
or after scoring goals? His habit of seemingly using stadium video screens as a personal vanity mirror for checking his grooming?
Ronaldo, after all, is hardly the first multimillionaire athlete to be found lacking in humility. But other
jocks— Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath come to mind—
made tactical boasting part of their personal legend.
Other contemporary soccer idols aren’t judged nearly
as harshly. Brazil’s Neymar, still a boyish 22-year-old,
gets a pass for his spiky, artfully mussed haircuts. Argentina’s Lionel Messi provokes grumbles in Buenos Aires
for playing in Barcelona, but he’s generally regarded as
easygoing and self-effacing, at least on the playing field.
One detects a certain double standard toward Ronaldo.
He’s considered a flop artist, but that’s hardly a capital
offense in high-stakes modern soccer.
He never head-butted an opponent in a World
Cup final, thereby getting ejected and probably costing
his team a victory (see: Zinedine Zidane). He never held
court on prime-time TV to announce which Rust Belt
team he would abandon in order to chase megabucks in
the Sunbelt (hello, LeBron James). Yet those athletes’
reputations have largely recovered.
Ronaldo never has been accused of biting an opponent or uttering racist slurs, like Luis Suárez, the Uruguayan goal-scoring machine who also plays for Liverpool of England’s Premier League. Yet after Suárez
scored both goals in his team’s 2-1 victory over England
on Thursday, his grinning, triumphant visage graced
newspapers and websites world-wide. Ronaldo, by contrast, has been mocked with YouTube montages of him
appearing near tears during the Germany debacle.
Nor is Ronaldo the first star footballer to be labeled with the dreaded M word, “metrosexual,” a term
that was practically coined to describe England poster
boy David Beckham. The difference, perhaps, is that
Becks was clever enough not to take his ever-changing
hairstyles and fashion mutations too seriously. In the
British tradition of great pop chameleons, he tried on new
identities and mix-matched personas with a wink and a
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