Why I love Ronaldinho
Ronaldinho is one of the best players of all time and had inspired a generation to emulate the way he played. He is, of course, a flawed character but we all are and I don’t know him so I can’t talk about what I like about him as a person.
However, I can go on forever about how much I admire him as a player. The thing that strikes us all when we watch highlights of him or see him in the flesh is that he was an incredible player, the man was so talented. He could do pretty much anything on the football pitch. His ball control was up there with the best of all time and if you look at videos of him training you can see what a relationship he had with the ball. There is a video on YouTube of Ronaldinho intentionally hitting the crossbar five times in a row and it is simply staggering. It turned out to be the first YouTube video to reach a million views. In an age where anything can be edited out, I hope that video is authentic which I think it is. Ronaldinho was a very casual footballer and I don’t mean it in a negative way. He always played football with a smile on his face and you would rarely see him angry. Again as the industry has become more business-minded it is no doubt a breath of fresh air to have seen a footballer who genuinely loved playing the sport.
A major part of Ronaldinho’s game was his skills and he was just amazing. I link it back to the crossbar video and his ball control, you need ball control to be skilful obviously. It was like he made Camp Nou, a 100,000-seater amphitheatre a playground. He was doing stepovers, flicks you name it. But the thing is now skills sometimes feel robotically orchestrated whilst with him it felt too natural and authentic. You can tell when someone is an outstanding player when he makes everything look so easy. Like I said before, the man could do it all. He was particularly dangerous from a dead ball. He would often stand in front of the ball at times to get a bunch of finesse on his strikes. He could go under the wall, over the wall. Perhaps one of his most famous free-kicks was in the 2002 World Cup where he caught out David Seamon off his line to score a sublime strike.
There is another reason why many football fans admire Ronaldinho and that is his friendship with Lionel Messi. I think his openness and warmth to young Argentina helped get Messi out of his shell and to develop into an incredible talent, after all it was Ronaldinho who assisted his disallowed goal and then his first goal and you can see the friendship blooming in the picture below.
With the help of Ronaldinho, Messi became a freighting player. It was clear that Ronaldinho loved to party and this would have hindered Messi if he were to emulate that behaviour. Note that Messi did at least party but he was necessarily a reveller like Ronaldinho. I think it was this attitude which made Pep Guardiola transfer him and also it made more room for Messi to develop into the main man. Nevertheless, I do think that Ronaldinho helped Messi with his confidence and helped him overcome his shyness and for that Messi can be eternally grateful to Ronaldinho. And for us fans, we can be grateful to him for developing one of the greatest players of all time.
I’ve said many things about him, his flair, passion, ball control and talent but I feel like he is a modest personality despite his flamboyant skills. For all of the reasons above, I admire Ronaldinho as a footballer.
