On the ball. Photograph: AP
Another great sneak preview from Sunday's Observer. This week, extracts from an exclusive interview and profile feature from the latest Sport Monthly Magazine.
Ronaldinho has just inspired Barcelona to their first Spanish title for six years. He talks to Justin Webster about football as art, the lasting effect of his father's early death and why, having almost signed for Manchester United, he would thrive in the Premiership.
The game ended with Barcelona's defenders passing the ball back and forth, the players of lowly Levante mere onlookers. The score was a hum-drum 1-1. Yet at the final whistle, fans, press and everyone on the Barcelona bench immediately invaded the pitch. The visiting players leapt for joy and a section of the crowd, in the small stadium in a suburb of Valencia, cheered ecstatically, a foretaste of the carnival atmosphere that would greet the team on their return to Catalonia. FC Barcelona – Barça to everyone in Spain – had won the Primera Liga. With two games left to play, Real Madrid could no longer catch them.
As usual, Ronaldinho was the last player to head for the dressing room. He was zigzagging across the grass, surrounded by journalists, cameras, outstretched microphones, security guards and fans. Just as he was about to reach the touchline, he broke free and rushed to the part of the ground where several thousand Barça supporters were celebrating. His run turned into a frenzied gallop, his face thrust out to the fans. A television commentator, searching for the words to go with the pictures, summed up the story so far of Ronaldinho in Spain: 'The media star. The number one.'
Almost two years ago, I witnessed Ronaldinho's arrival from inside the club as I worked on a television film about Barça. The starting point of the film was that the biggest football club in the world – if measured by the 100,000-strong total _ of members, who are also Barça's owners – was in one of the worst crises of its long history, with debts accumulating and a football team that had won nothing for four years. Meanwhile, Real Madrid, Barça's traditional rival, had become a powerhouse of trophy-winning, branding and glamour.
The group of young Catalan executives who, in June 2003, won the club elections to take over the management, led by a 40yearold lawyer called Joan Laporta, promised new policies to reverse the decline. Their aim was the signing of a 'world-class media star', both as a way of inspiring Barça supporters and rebuilding the club's tarnished brand. David Beckham was the first choice. The young progressives boosted their credibility before the elections when they persuaded Manchester United to agree to sell them Beckham, if they were to win the elections and if Beckham were to agree. Three days after they won on 15 June in a landslide, Beckham snubbed them and went to Real Madrid. It was in this context that Laporta and his team went about trying to sign Ronaldinho. It wasn't just another signing: it had become – because of the state of the club, the campaign promises and the controversial Beckham saga – a question of survival.
Two years on, Ronaldinho arrives for our interview looking taller and slimmer than you would think from his muscular presence on the pitch. He wears a close-fitting dark blue tracksuit. His long black tresses are tied up in a headband. He has a silver 'R' on a chain around his neck and a gold and diamond-encrusted stud in his left ear.
WE MEET JUST BEFORE BARCELONA clinch the title, but the mood in the club as well as among the players is calm and confident. Ronaldinho startles some fans waiting to greet another player, then charms them equally by offering to leave when the meeting room seems to have been double-booked. Despite his need for stardom on the pitch, he is celebrated for a surprising humility and grace off it. Ronaldinho's second season in Barcelona has not been as heroic as the first, when, virtually single-handed, he dragged the team up the table after a disastrous start to the season and ensured that they qualified for the Champions League. But it has been as rich, if not richer, in the moments that more precisely define him. One example: when, as they say in Spain, he invented a goal, the second against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge during the Champions League quarter-final. Who can forget what happened? Ronaldinho stopped, standing with the ball at his feet, just outside the area, with the whole of the Chelsea defence well positioned in front of him. Then, from there, he toe-punted the ball into the back of the net. Petr Cech, the Chelsea goalkeeper and probably the best in Europe, hardly moved. 'When I received the ball I was going to pass to [Andrés] Iniesta,' Ronaldinho says now, looking down at his bare feet (he extracted them carefully from plastic sandals and placed them on the carpet after he sat down). He talks cheerfully in simple Spanish with a strong Brazilian accent. 'Then someone blocked the pass, and I said to myself, "I'll try to dribble". At the moment I was going to try, I looked at the goal and I saw that if the ball went hard, if it could get through an angle hard enough, it would be a goal. And well, it came off the tip of the toe hard, just in the way I wanted and... perfecto! 'When I look at that goal now it seems like someone pressed pause and for three seconds all the players on the pitch have stopped and I am the only one that moves. Because it was a moment when I stopped the ball, and everyone stopped. And then what happened, happened.'
What happened was a creation, an invention, something new. 'Shooting with the tip of the toe – a toe punt – seems very unskilful, the sort of thing a bad player would do,' says Joan Golobart, a former player who writes a column of technical analysis for the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia. 'It gives much more power for a much shorter kick, and therefore surprise, but it has a terrible drawback. The smallest error leads to the ball going off at an angle. Only a player with almost unimaginable technical ability could attempt it from that far out.'
The only other player he remembers using the toe punt was another Brazilian who played for Barcelona, Romario, but over much shorter distances, and usually when one on one with the goalkeeper. 'The goal against Chelsea comes from playing with joie de vivre,' says Golobart. 'Every time Ronaldinho has the ball he believes he's capable of creating something that will lead to a goal. He has a footballing component, the capacity for improvisation, which is the only way – by means of surprise – to overcome organised defensive systems. It's a component – and here I'm being more philosophical, but I think it's true – that gives him the sort of stardom he needs. He needs to feel he's the essential link in the team. I believe the great explosion of Ronaldinho could not have happened until a club in crisis had to look to a figure to save them. His ego needs this.' ….
RONALDINHO'S ARRIVAL IN BARCELONA in July 2003 was like an affair of state. Inside the club – besieged by journalists – the details of the contract were being negotiated while Ronaldinho and Laporta patted a ball around in the president's office. At the moment of signing, Ronaldinho hummed a tune to himself. There could hardly have been better synergy between the new ambitious executives in control of the club and the man they were gambling on to fulfil their aspirations and satisfy the expectations of the fans.
Sandro Rosell, a former Nike executive in Brazil who is now Barça's vice-president for sports, negotiated the club's difficult path through the transfer market. He was already friendly with Ronaldinho, whom Nike had sponsored since 1998. Rosell had spotted his talent long before he scored a spectacular goal on his Brazil debut in the Copa America in 1999.
'He was just like he is now, a guy who is always happy, delighted with life, his family, and football,' Rosell says when we meet. Extremely well connected, with a Latin sensibility and an American-style business ethic, Rosell helped give Barça the edge in negotiations, when it seemed almost certain that Ronaldinho would go to Manchester United.
How close that move came can be judged by how admiringly Ronaldinho speaks of Manchester United and indeed Chelsea. 'They are both great clubs with excellent players. Any player would be happy to play in these teams,' he says, 'and in that league.' He imagines – against received opinion in Spain – how he could have thrived in the English game. 'A football player can adapt to any league. In England it's a bit more difficult. There it is very fast, but if you really want to, and are dedicated, you can adapt anywhere.'
I remember the day before Ronaldinho arrived in Barcelona, when the Spanish press were calling every few minutes to find out what was happening and Rosell appeared surprisingly confident when he was asked how the negotiations were going, at a private meeting with Laporta and another executive. Manchester United seemed much more likely than a poor and unsuccessful Barcelona to close the deal. 'We are stuck in the ground like a tree waiting for news from the British Isles,' Rosell said at the time. 'No news is good news.'
So what happened? 'In the end, he just wanted to come to Barcelona,' Rosell says. 'And from a technical point of view, I wasn't in favour of Beckham [joining Barça].'
Even before the club elections were called, Rosell had talked to Ronaldinho about Barça. On 29 March 2003, the day before Brazil played a friendly match against Mexico in Guadalajara, Rosell met the player in his hotel room and told him about his plans to join Joan Laporta in standing for election to the club's ruling board. If they won, Rosell said he wanted to sign Ronaldinho. 'I'm with you all the way,' the player said.
'We knew investing in Ronaldinho would be different from investing in David Beckham,' said Ferran Soriano, the vice-president for finance, who, at that time, was still struggling with the club's chaotic accounts. 'Beckham gives you an immediate commercial result. Ronaldinho was more of a risk, in the sense that he gives you sporting performance from day one and, if you are consistent and develop it, a commercial impact later. Could we have signed them both? Looking back, I tend to say no.'
When it was time to negotiate seriously, not only Manchester United but Real Madrid and others were bidding for a player everyone knew was ready to leave Paris Saint-Germain, for whom he had signed in April 2001. According to Toni Frieros, author of Ronaldinho, la magia de un crack (the magic of a star), his brother Roberto said it was then too early for him to sign for a bigger club. He would need time to adapt to European football. His three seasons in France proved this to be true: he scored only three goals in his first year and eight in his last. More important, he fell out with the manager and was relegated to the bench more often than expected. PSG failed to qualify for the Champions League, finishing 11th in the league in 2003.
By then, the clubs were ready and waiting. In Lyon, his brother Roberto was going from one hotel to another negotiating with clubs. Rosell stuck at £27 million and left, convinced that he had lost. Manchester United had just sold Beckham to Real _ for £25m and were in a far better financial state than Barça. The offer from Real had been higher, but it would have meant Ronaldinho staying at PSG for another season, which effectively ruled it out.
'The next day I said, "This can't be",' recalls Rosell of the United and Real bids. Back in Barcelona, Rosell started to call everyone he could until, eventually, he was speaking to Ronaldinho's mother, Miguelina, in Porto Alegre. The only card they had left to play was that living in Barcelona would suit the family much better than in England. 'The difference in the offers wasn't that big,' Rosell told me. 'Manchester United were offering a little more to PSG and to the player. It was a Thursday. I remember that Manchester were going on tour to the US – as were Barça – and when their plane took off they thought Ronaldinho was theirs. By the time they landed, he had signed for us.'
The full version of this interview appears in Observer Sport Monthly on Sunday 5 June.
