I was in Barcelona when he signed on for the football team, in fact, and that might have been the only two years I ever spent watching club football on the box. The only time I saw him in the flesh was when the team did a victory parade through the city and I just happened to be in the vicinity. I've also been to his home-town, Porto Alegre, just to break up the bus ride from Montevideo back to Rio, and must say that city had a nice feel about it. I actually met the Porto Alegre football team in Sao Paulo airport on my way out and had a chat with one of the players.
The Brazilian has retired after an extraordinary career but his wonderful talent will be remembered for ever. ‘He changed our history,’ the Barcelona midfielder Xavi said.
Ronaldinho. See? You’re smiling already. Just thinking about the things he did and the way he did them, the way he was, gets you giggling. Look him up on YouTube and maybe you’ll fall for him all over again, a bit like all those defenders. Watch for long enough – it won’t take long – and you might even feel like standing to applaud, just like the Santiago Bernabéu did, an ovation for a Barcelona player, as if for all the rivalry they hadn’t so much been beaten by his genius as shared in it. Sergio Ramos was on the floor, they were on their feet. Cameras zoomed on a man in the north stand with a moustache and a cigarette hanging limp from his lip: Bloody hell, did you see what he just did?
It’s a question that was asked a lot. What Ronaldinho did, no one else did. And it wasn’t just what he did; it was the way he made people feel. Nostalgia, memories, are about that: not so much events but emotions. Watching Ronaldinho was fun, it made people happy. Those may be two of the most simple, childish words of all but they are the right ones. Football stripped right down to its essence: happy, fun.
Funny, too.
There may never have been a player who made the game as enjoyable as Ronaldinho, in part because he played and it was a game. “I love the ball,” he said. One coach, he recalled, told him to change, insisting that he would never make it as a footballer, but he was wrong. It was because he played, because he enjoyed it, that he succeeded: the grin on his face was not just there after he won the league, the Champions League, the World Cup and the Ballon d’Or, it was there while he won them. It became contagious. “He changed our history,” Barcelona midfielder Xavi Hernández said.
Timeline
https://www.theguardian.com/football/bl ... -barcelona
