Ronaldinho — A Retrospective Look At the Flawed Legend
A couple of years ago, I saw Ronaldinho play on TV. I don’t remember which team he was playing for. Perhaps it was Gremio or Fluminense? Honestly it didn’t matter: it was an obscure match in the Brazilian league where an aging superstar was playing miserable football. My tolerance for low quality football is generally very low, yet as often is the case with Ronaldinho, I could not turn it off. Of course there were a couple no-look passes, and a sobrero that appealed to my base attraction to football aesthetics. There was also Dinho’s characteristic laziness on the pitch, his lack of defensive awareness and his obvious carelessness — All served as evidence as to why no European teams wanted to take a chance on him. My feelings, much like his performance, were scattered: part awe, part frustration, part disgust.
Evaluating Ronaldinho in the context of football history is a difficult task and raises some interesting questions. How much should pure talent overcome longevity? or to be more precise, should unseen brevity weigh more than apparent inconsistency? Most importantly how much should retrospective history affect our current evaluation?
I’ve always been somewhat clement to Ronaldinho as a historical figure. I’ve written extensively about his role in modernizing and expanding the role of offensive football players. Dinho was a post modern wing: a player capable of not only playing wide a-la Ryan Giggs but also able to drift inside, score, pass and cause all kind of headaches to an opposing defense. I’ve also praised Ronaldinho’s distinctive uniqueness as a football talent. In 2007, I started an ambitions football anthology project ranking the ten best football players of all time in a series of essays. At the time, I had him ninth on my list. Dinho was already starting to decline, but back then, this was not an unreasonable argument.
My clemency is by no means unique, it is very much universal across people my age. There is a reverence afforded to Ronaldinho among my friends that I don’t quite understand. To this day, he’s still the football player that I’ll see come up the most on my Facebook feed. Some of it is understandably nostalgia. Some of it are moments that deserve to be remembered: his 2005 Classico exploit comes to mind. Most of it however, is unwarranted.
Alas football has changed a lot in the past ten years. Leo Messi took Barcelona to heights Ronaldinho never did and helped establish a proper era of neo-Cruyffism dominance. Iniesta became the best midfielder in football circa Zinedine Zidane. Cristiano Ronaldo won an international competition and four Ballon d’Or. La Furia Roja won an international treble. All of this disruption almost render Dinho’s excellent 05–06 campaign obsolete in the context of modern football. This is to say that we cannot and should not view Ronaldinho’s career through rose-colored glasses.
Let me be clear: I like Dinho, I consider myself an fan of his but I am not a Dinho apologist. An objective look at Dinho’s career reveals many flaws that should not be ignored.
A common misconception is that Dinho stopped playing high level football after 2007. While this statement is not exactly incorrect, it is incomplete: during most of Ronaldinho’s 18 year career, he didn’t play at an elite level, let alone up to his potential. Prior to 2004 (2003 if I’m being generous), Ronaldinho had never played an elite season.
This is not an exaggeration, he never ranked in the top ten of the Ballon D’Or voting before 2004. His Paris Saint-Germain years were almost as despicable as his post 2007 play. It’s not that he was horrible, but his inconsistency from game to game was so baffling that he doesn’t deserve a pass. Not to mention, PSG were never able to challenge Lyon with him and most la Ligue 1 experts would agree that he didn’t have the impact his international teammate Juninho Pernambucano had on his team in the early two thousands.
An cheap explanation for his lack of silverware in France is that he didn’t have enough talent around him to win. This might have been a fine excuse in 2002 but since he left France, Eden Hazard, Frank Ribery and Zlatan Hibrahimovic all proved that a transcendent talent can overcome any obstacle in la Ligue 1.
It is undeniable that when playing at his best, Ronaldinho was the most dominant player of the last twenty years — Apologies to Zidane, Ronaldo Luiz and Messi. His performances against Real Madrid remains the most impressive individual play of the last decade (Honorable mentions for his own performances against Chelsea in 2005 and 2006, Ronaldo’s Old Trafford game with Madrid and Rivaldo’s extraordinary-but-often-forgetten hat trick against Valencia). In essence this is what makes his evaluation so difficult. On one end, his first couple seasons with Barcelona demonstrated that when he was in the right state of mind psychologically and physically, he could be unstoppable. In that sense, as much as I believe his fans overrate him, football thinkers tend to underrate his impact. On the other end, Dinho’s level of play before 2003 and after 2007 were objectively poor.
For a man who clearly loves football, I cannot bring myself to understand why Gaucho stopped playing football ten years ago. Let’s put this into perspective, his last elite season was in 2006, he was 26 then. Maradona was still the best football player in the 1990 world cup at age 30. Cristiano Ronaldo just won the Ballon d’Or at age 31. Messi is still the best player in the world at age 30 and Zidane carried France to a World Cup final at age 34. This was disappointing in 2008 when it was clear he’d never be back to his 05 form. Writing this in 2017 is intolerable and feels straight up depressing.
Is it fair to let all of those external factors affect my opinion of him? Certainly not but they do anyways. You cannot be the ninth best player of all time when three of your contemporaries have surpassed you within 5 years of your last good season. Ronaldinho should have been the first great false nine. He should’ve been great well into his thirties. He had the size, the physical gifts and the talent to become the best player of all time, an argument that would have been made easy since he won the World Cup with Brazil in 2002.
Instead he’s George Best or Romario: Great for sure, historical even but certainly not in the Messi/Maradonna/Ronaldo Luiz tier. Perhaps most importantly, (like Best and Romario) he should be remembered for his wasted potential.
