One dances with the ball at his feet to the tune of all the chants that ring out in his praise; while the other one rips through the length of the pitch, hacking away obstacles till the ball crosses the goal line. One glues the team together, his deft movements and vision orchestrating the entire play; while the other carries the team on his shoulders, expecting and demanding that the ball be passed to him.
Behold the era of Messi and Ronaldo – two of the greatest footballers we have ever seen and we will ever see; a rivalry that has rendered all stats and records of the past obsolete.
The stories of their childhoods are so similar yet so different – while both hail from financially modest backgrounds with three siblings, Messi and Ronaldo were to face completely different challenges in their path to the very top.
As with all of us, those childhood chronicles have shaped these two legends – how they play, how they live and how they speak. Here we examine in a nutshell the story of the childhood of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo – and how those experiences were to mould them forever.
Messi's Barcelona Love Story, Cristiano the self-made man
Not many napkins find themselves a place in football history, but there is one that is central to it. It has become the stuff of legend that Lionel Messi signed his first Barcelona contract on a paper napkin – the closest piece of paper that Barcelona's technical director Charly Rexach could find.
But the paper was much more than a contract – it bound Messi to Barcelona in a bond of gratitude that has lasted 16 years till date – towards a club that took upon itself all costs of treatment for his growth hormone deficiency as a 13-year-old. Lionel Messi was to become a one-club man the moment he signed on that napkin, and even if he ends up leaving Barcelona at some point in the future, there is no question about the place he will always be identified with.
Ronaldo, on the other hand, is more of a self-made man, though Sporting Lisbon and Sir Alex Ferguson deserve varying degrees of credit for his development as a player. Rather than tuning to sync with his teammates, the Portuguese has always focused on getting better himself at what he does – so the identity of Ronaldo would likely have been the same at a different set of clubs as well.
When Ronaldo draws the curtains on an illustrious career, several people would associate him with Real Madrid and perhaps a few with Manchester United – but in all likelihood, he would identify himself most closely with Portugal.
Top 15 Pictures of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo
Messi "The Flea", Ronaldo "The crybaby"
Far less tangible than the metrics of winning or losing a football match, Messi is adored all around the globe for the way he makes time stand still when on the ball – a feint here, a nutmeg there, a flick here – and off he is!! Ever since his childhood, Messi has garnered adulation wherever he went – his school teacher Monica Domine fondly recollects that during the break time in school hours, the boys used to play football and everybody would argue over who would get to have Lionel in their team.
Nicknamed 'La Pulga Atomica', or 'The Atomic Flea', everyone marvelled at how this tiny boy glided past opponents at will.
When Ronaldo started playing street football at a very young age, he picked up a markedly different nickname – "The crybaby." In the words of Ronaldo's mother, "He used to cry when he passed and his friends didn't score, so people called him crybaby."
In that sense, then, perhaps no other nickname suits him better – Ronaldo has always wanted and demanded more – from himself, his teammates and his club. It may sound rhetorical, but perhaps the best way to describe the two is as follows: Messi loves to win, whereas Ronaldo hates to lose.
The story of Two Fathers
Jorge Horacio Messi is the agent of Lionel Messi, but a long time before that, he was haggling with Barcelona over the terms under which he would agree to send his son to La Masia. Finally, he settled for a job at £40,000 per year plus, of course, his son's treatment expenses at almost $1000 a month.
Recently, when charged alongside his father on count of committing tax fraud, Messi admitted that he only worried about playing football and left all financial affairs up to his father. That is who Jorge Messi has been – an ever watchful eye cast over the career of his famous son – a son who in turn has grown to become a family man himself.
Jose Dinis Aveiro, on the other hand, turned an alcoholic when Ronaldo was aged 14, and became so addicted that he used to sell his son's Manchester United jerseys to raise money to buy booze. As a kid, his teammates made fun of Ronaldo, because his dad cleaned the locker rooms to earn something extra.
Aveiro passed away as a 52-year-old despite Ronaldo's best attempts to provide him cutting edge treatment. But before all that, Aveiro always used to tell his friends that he had a son who will be the best player in the world. You can find the influence of his story in everything about Ronaldo – a complete teetotaler, a passion to silence naysayers and an utterly unshakeable belief that he is the best player in the world.
