Confessions of a Failed Ronaldo Fan

People love Cristiano Ronaldo. I sometimes lose sight of that fact, which probably says more about me than it does about him. Twelve years ago, when the world was new and he and Messi were young, it started to become clear what the next era of soccer was going to look like, and you had two choices about how you were going to live in it. Namely:

(1) You could try to see that both Messi and Ronaldo were human beings, complex and changeable, and you could understand that the story of their careers would not be a simple moral fable but would encompass all the contingency and ambiguity of any human life, and would therefore elude interpretation. Or...

(2) You could just kind of not do those things.

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