This article has been updated as part of The Athletic’s coverage of Euro 2024 and the Copa America, having originally been published in 2021.
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Paul Clement, formerly Carlo Ancelotti’s assistant manager at Real Madrid, is recalling a typical scene from the years when the Bernabeu danced to the tune of Cristiano Ronaldo, superstar.
“We were coming back from a Champions League away game one night. You’re always late leaving the ground after the doping tests. You get to the airport and it takes forever for the skips to be loaded onto the plane. So, by the time we get back to the training ground in Madrid, it is often 3am or 4am.
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“It’s not a day off, the next day. The players are in for training in the afternoon because we are playing again in two days. So getting off the bus, they’re grabbing their bags…you’d hear the vroom of the cars and they’d be off, screeching away through the gate. Fair enough, it’s 4am. Go and get some rest.”
Not all the players, though.
“I turn around and there’s Cristiano, pulling Pepe and Fabio Coentrao towards the main building: ‘We’re going for an ice bath’. It’s 4am and not only is he doing it, he’s getting others to participate as well. It’s ultra-professional. These are the things he does, over and over. And it’s that compound effect of doing the little things really, really well that has got him to that superhuman level.”
Ronaldo sounds like a manager’s dream and that’s because, for the most part, he is a manager’s dream.
Just look at the work he puts in. Look at his numbers, the goals, the records he has broken — enough trophies and individual awards to fill an aircraft hangar — and the twitching, 24-7 obsession with being the absolute best he possibly can be.
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But there are still challenges when managing Ronaldo, as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Ralf Rangnick and, in particular, Erik ten Hag found out during his second coming at Manchester United.
Sir Alex Ferguson, that brilliant man-manager, got it right during Ronaldo’s first spell at the club. Ancelotti did, too. Luiz Felipe Scolari was another manager who Ronaldo would eventually call “father”. And there is a common theme among the managers who got the best out of Ronaldo: they knew he was special, so they treated him like he was special.
Yet there are plenty of others — Jose Mourinho, Rafa Benitez, Carlos Queiroz and Maurizio Sarri among them — whose relationship with Ronaldo broke down or completely disintegrated in some cases because they could not handle his ego. The golden rule is: keep him happy. But sometimes that is easier said than done.
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The first lesson, perhaps, is to indulge him. Fluff his ego, talk him up. Ronaldo needs to feel loved. He wants to be important, so treat him like a king. Let’s be honest, he already wears the look of a man who believes his face should be on a banknote.
“I remember one story,” says Laszlo Boloni, the manager at Sporting Lisbon who gave a 17-year-old Ronaldo his debut. “I was asked on the radio how good I thought he was going to be. I said I hoped Ronaldo would make us forget Eusebio and Luis Figo.
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“Within an hour, my lawyer was on the phone. My lawyer was a Benfica fan and had a role on the Benfica board. He told me I was crazy and that the Benfica fans were up in arms. For them, Eusebio was like the singer Amalia Rodrigues, the ‘Queen of Fado’ — Portuguese royalty. If you disrespect one of them, everybody is against you.
“I told my lawyer that I thought Ronaldo could do it, barring injury. He told me I was making a big mistake. So we made a deal: if Ronaldo went on to do something really special, he had to buy me a nice bottle of Champagne. If not, I would buy him one. I spoke with my lawyer again after Ronaldo won his first Ballon d’Or. The Champagne tasted good.”
A clever manager will understand that it is worth making allowances.
When Ancelotti took charge at Real Madrid for the first time, there was an important conversation to be had with the team’s star player.
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Ancelotti was so convinced 4-3-2-1 was the best formation for an elite team that he had written a book, Il Mio Albero Di Natale, that took its title (My Christmas Tree) from the idea.
But there was one reason Ancelotti did not implement that formation at Madrid: Ronaldo preferred it another way.
“Carlo started to pencil in what the team might look like, even before the players arrived for pre-season,” says Clement. “That was with Cristiano as a striker.
“Cristiano came to Carlo and said he felt more comfortable playing off the left, coming in, making passes, hitting crosses and shots. And this was one of Carlo’s greatest strengths as a coach. All he said was, ‘Well, you have to be comfortable, that’s the most important thing’. So he developed the system to help make him comfortable.”
Another manager might have wanted to impose himself and let everyone know, from day one, who was The Boss. But Ancelotti had the common sense to realise that acceding to Ronaldo’s wishes could benefit himself, too. And don’t mistake that with “player-power” or Ronaldo being spoiled.
“No,” says Clement, “it was Carlo. Carlo had the conversation with Cristiano and came up with that idea. Carlo, all the way.”
Maybe this is where Benitez failed when he succeeded Ancelotti at the Bernabeu in 2015: his refusal to defer to Ronaldo’s wishes.
“The biggest mistake is to try to fit Ronaldo into the system, or put the system ahead of the player,” says one former coach, who asked not to be identified. “That’s what Rafa was trying to do. You need to be clever enough to do the opposite — in many senses, building the team around Ronaldo. What happens sometimes is that coaches expect him to behave like a normal player. That’s a big mistake.”
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Aitor Karanka, one of Mourinho’s assistants at Real Madrid, has a slightly different take.
“A player like Cristiano is always different but, with Jose, the team was always above everybody,” says Karanka. “There were moments when Cristiano scored goals, as he always did, but there were also moments when Jose and the team knew they needed to defend. And Cristiano was the first who defended, too. You have to make him see that, apart from all the goals he scores, there are other moments when you need to do certain tactical things.”
Did Ronaldo have to be assured he was the best in the world?
“Yes,” says Karanka. “We all like to hear that we are the best at what we do. And when you are the best, then even more. But also sometimes there was an element of motivation. When he did not hear it, he would want to prove the following day that he was the best. And he would tell you, ‘Do you not see that I am the best?’.”
It is all about finding the right balance and Mourinho, to give him his due, won La Liga with Madrid at a time when many observers thought Pep Guardiola had assembled the most beautifully constructed Barcelona side ever seen. Mourinho’s relationship with Ronaldo might have soured dramatically, but there were happier times, too.
“It was a privilege to share a dressing room with him,” says Karanka. “It is very easy to coach Cristiano Ronaldo. I cannot remember anybody who was a better professional; the demands he puts on himself, the aim for perfection, to improve every day.”
Over time, Mourinho appeared to forget he was dealing with a complex and sensitive individual who needed to feel affection from his manager. But Benitez, whose time at Madrid was short and unhappy, never seemed to appreciate that in the first place.
When the Spanish journalists asked him at his first press conference if he considered Ronaldo to be the best player in the world, the furthest Benitez would go was to say “one of the best”.
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Shortly after taking the job, Benitez arranged a visit to the Wales squad to meet Gareth Bale for the first time. One problem: Ronaldo’s camp made it known that the Portuguese player had not received the same treatment. Relations started to deteriorate and suspicion set in.
Perhaps you might think it refreshing that Benitez refused to pander to Ronaldo’s ego. Or maybe it was poor management? The Spaniard was too standoffish, too distant, too bound to his own methodology. He could never find the right formula with Ronaldo and, as a consequence, the team suffered. And Ronaldo being Ronaldo, the manager does not tend to win these battles.
Benitez lasted only seven months at the Bernabeu and, shortly after he was fired, details appeared in El Pais newspaper about how he had delegated a member of staff to give Ronaldo a USB stick showing him clips about how to lose his marker.
That story told us a lot about the relationship between manager and player.
Ronaldo did not want to take it and sent a message back: “Tell Benitez that I’ll send him a USB drive with all my goals on it for him to study.”
Speak to Ferguson about Ronaldo and the first thing you notice is the way his eyes light up. He loves to talk about the boy he signed from under the noses of Arsenal and Liverpool.
“Cristiano Ronaldo was the most gifted player I managed,” Ferguson writes in his autobiography. “He surpassed all the other great ones I coached at United. And I had many.”
The admiration is mutual, too. There is nothing hammy about their enduring respect for one another. It runs deeper than just football.
Ronaldo has never forgotten Ferguson’s support for him after the death of his father in 2005, or how his club manager backed him after Wayne Rooney’s red card for England against his Portugal side at the 2006 World Cup.
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Who could forget that wink to the Portugal bench right after Rooney had been sent off? Ronaldo was so demonised in the English media that he seriously considered abandoning United. Ferguson, that fierce protector of his own, flew to Portugal for a heart-to-heart. “You’re one of the bravest players to come to Manchester United, but walking away isn’t courage,” he told his player.
Don’t think, however, that Ronaldo was immune to the occasional blast of Ferguson’s ‘Hairdryer’ treatment. Not many managers would ever dare to bawl out Ronaldo, but Ferguson would.
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The time, for example, United went to Benfica in the Champions League and Ronaldo was so desperate to excel against Portuguese opponents he made the classic mistake of letting the occasion get to him.
“The game became The Cristiano Ronaldo Show,” Rio Ferdinand writes in his autobiography. “He was trying to show his skills and nothing was coming off. We lost and afterwards the manager absolutely destroyed him. ‘Playing by yourself? Who the hell do you think you are?’.
“Ferguson was brave to do that. He knew Ronaldo was the key to us winning anything. A lot of managers would have been scared of taking him on. I never saw England managers hammering David Beckham like that, or Steven Gerrard, or Frank Lampard, or Wayne Rooney. But Ferguson would go for anyone. It didn’t matter if you were the main man, he’d open you up if you needed it.”
One theory in the dressing room was that if Ferguson could turn on Ronaldo, it was a warning to everyone.
“It was Ferguson’s way of saying to the whole team, ‘It doesn’t matter who you are, you’d better perform in the right way’,” Ferdinand recalls.
Unfortunately for United, Ronaldo was a different beast when they gazumped Manchester City to sign him, under Solskjaer’s management, the second time.
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“It was a very quick decision,” says Solskjaer. “We didn’t think Cristiano was available. When it became apparent he was leaving Juventus, obviously there were other clubs wanting him.
“They (United) asked me, ‘Would you want us to try this?’. I was excited, so I said yes. I thought, ‘Yes, he’s 37, but we’ll have to manage that because he’s the best goalscorer in the world’. It was my decision. It didn’t work out for me and it didn’t work out for Cristiano, but it was the right decision.”
Was it, though? Solskjaer can say that as somebody who held Ronaldo’s respect. But there was a heap of evidence that Ronaldo had little time for Rangnick, who was next in line, and relations quickly soured with Ten Hag.
Everything culminated in the sequence of events that led to the player demanding a transfer and going rogue, in an unauthorised interview with Piers Morgan, to force his way out of the club.
“I wanted him to stay from the first moment,” Ten Hag later told The Athletic. “He wanted to leave, it was quite clear. And when a player definitely doesn’t want to be in this club, then he has to go. The interview — as a club, you can’t accept. To make that step, he knew the consequences.”
Ronaldo, you may recall, felt “betrayed” that he was not being shown more love, that he was not playing every week and that the club had fallen from the top of English football since his departure 12 years earlier.
He had already made it his business to ensure everyone was aware of his discontent when he was substituted in a friendly at Old Trafford against Rayo Vallecano and left the stadium in a huff, driving home in a one-man protest. It was, said Ten Hag, “unacceptable”.
Interestingly, most United fans sided with Ten Hag during the public fallout that led to Ronaldo moving to Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia. But there were also signs that Ronaldo, though still supremely fit, was no longer the player of old. And that, perhaps, was the hardest thing for him to accept because it meant, as Ten Hag showed, a different approach.
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Just consider Ronaldo’s tearful exit from the World Cup in Qatar when polls in Portuguese newspapers called for the national team manager, Fernando Santos, to drop him. In Portugal’s final two games, the previously unthinkable happened: Ronaldo suffered the ignominy of being downgraded to a substitute.
Roberto Martinez, who replaced Santos last year, immediately brought Ronaldo back into Portugal’s starting XI, which felt like a clever way to avoid a major controversy so quickly after taking the job.
At that stage, however, the art of managing Ronaldo was more about winning his trust than educating him, as it was in his earlier years.
Ferguson had also taken Ronaldo’s side when Ruud van Nistelrooy shoved his young colleague on the training pitch one day for not passing to him.
At other times, the manager lectured Ronaldo about his exaggerated falls trying to win free kicks. In training, Ferguson was happy for the other players to go in hard on him as part of the toughening-up process. Ferguson had to do a lot of the work, in other words, that is not necessary now.
With Ronaldo, however, it is easy to understand why Roy Keane describes him as the most intelligent team-mate he ever had.
“Tactically, he knew everything,” says Boloni, his former manager at Sporting. “Sometimes he would try a dribble, make a mistake and lose the ball. I would just shout, ‘Ronaldo!’ — only his name — and, in the next moment, he was doing exactly what he had to do.
“I didn’t have to explain anything. It wasn’t, ‘Now get back… move to the left… go inside’. Already, he was sprinting back to the correct position or winning back the ball. I didn’t need to repeat what I expected from him tactically.
“Sure, he’s a striker, and strikers don’t like to defend. But if the team needed Ronaldo to do defensive work, he would do it. Even now, he goes back to defend corners. He’s not someone who causes problems for a manager.”
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That last line is not strictly true if you remember Queiroz’s time as manager of Portugal’s national team and the friction that developed between the pair. Ronaldo always understood the power of his own voice.
“Ask Queiroz,” he replied when asked to explain his disappointing performances at the 2010 World Cup. Queiroz was sacked after the tournament and, according to Guillem Balague’s 2015 biography of Ronaldo, did not speak to the player again.
Neither should we forget Ronaldo’s reaction when Sarri had the temerity to substitute him 55 minutes into a Juventus match against AC Milan (Ronaldo walked straight down the tunnel, showered and left the stadium before full-time). Or Ronaldo’s change in attitude during his final season under Ferguson’s management, when his heart was set on Real Madrid and he gave the impression sometimes that he saw Old Trafford as a five-star prison (sample quote: “I am a slave”).
The nadir was a Manchester derby late in that 2008-09 season when Ferguson substituted him before the hour-mark and Ronaldo’s enraged reaction led to a rare public admonishment from his manager. “You cannot get everything your own way,” Ferguson told the media afterwards.
By that stage, Ronaldo was only a few weeks away from leaving and Ferguson, of course, knew that.
So, how do you improve a player who has taken the game to its highest level? How do you tell a five-time Ballon d’Or winner what he could do better?
The answer, in short, is you don’t.
“There are lots of things you simply don’t coach him in,” says Clement. “You provide an environment; a framework. You provide discipline, but it’s more about providing the right environment for him to flourish.
“Carlo was very good at managing that side of things — being firm but fair, demanding respect in both directions: ‘I’m a man, you’re a man. I was a player, you’re a player. I respect your job, you’ve got to respect my job’.
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Above all, Ronaldo expects brilliance to be met with brilliance. “Nobody can drop their level or have a lazy day off,” said another of his former coaches, who spoke anonymously to protect relationships. “His attitude is contagious. It puts pressure on everyone to raise their levels. If you show him a video, he expects it to be clean and precise. If it is a messy presentation, he’ll ask why it’s s***.”
So it is fair to say there are certain challenges for Martinez with Portugal and Luis Castro with Al Nassr.
Castro, a 62-year-old Portuguese, replaced the Frenchman Rudi Garcia three months after Ronaldo had joined the club. Various reports indicated Ronaldo had been involved in the selection process and, though that right would not usually be afforded to a player, the bottom line here is that this is not just any ordinary player.
“There were times when training did not suit him because it was not revolving around him,” says Mike Phelan, United’s long-time assistant manager. “And he would tell us that. He’d let us know if he enjoyed it or if he thought it was s***. That was his nature, but we liked that.”
All of which helps to explain why Ferguson, eight years after retiring, made a personal intervention to get Ronaldo back to Old Trafford in 2021. “Look at the old footage of Ferguson talking to Ronaldo,” Phil Neville, the former United player, points out. “He’s always got his arm around him.”
The managers who treat Ronaldo this way tend to be rewarded with a full, peacock-like spreading of his feathers.
“He asked me one day about English grammar,” says Clement, and now he is laughing. “He pulled me to one side and said, ‘Paul, what’s a phrasal verb in English?’. I had to tell him I didn’t have a clue. ‘What do you mean you don’t know? You’re English’. But we don’t really learn like that, do we? He’d have been in Madrid for three or four years at that point. It turned out he was still studying English.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)