Cristiano Ronaldo did his part. The prolific scorer had the opportunity to lead Real Madrid to the La Liga title. Madrid were one point behind Barcelona going into the last match of the season. A win for them and any negative result for Barcelona would see the capital club usurp their rivals. Madrid faced Deportivo and Barcelona were up against Granada. Ronaldo scored twice in the first half and so didn't play the second. The game had already been won.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s legacy is out of his hands
The legendary scorer has been phenomenal for underperforming Real Madrid. The jury is out on whether that makes him great or not.
Photo by Juan Manuel Serrano Arce/Getty Images
All there was left to do was wait for Barcelona to lose or draw. Instead, they won. Three Luis Suarez goals meant that Barcelona were once again Spanish champions, and Madrid again runner-ups.
It’s so analogical of Ronaldo’s time at Real Madrid that he should lift his team to victory, that he should show up when the time called for a hero and score two goals to put Madrid in pole position for success, only to still come up empty-handed. He had 51 goals in a season, a testament to his individual prowess, and still he was utterly powerless in the face of the grander success. He did all he could and all that was left was for him to wait for circumstances to fall in his favor. As has been the case more often than not, the circumstances benefited his rival instead.
Ronaldo arrived at Madrid in 2009. Since that time, Madrid have only won the league once, the Copa twice and the Champions League once, La Decima. In that same time, Barcelona have won the league four out of six times, the Copa twice and the Champions League twice. Madrid have an opportunity to match the European success soon but the other competitions seem to be forever distant. After all, the league was Barca’s to lose, not theirs to win.
Individually, Ronaldo has only gotten his white whale, the Ballon d’Or, twice to Lionel Messi’s four awards since the 2009-2010 season. That initial year, he didn’t even make the top three for the award as Messi won it, flanked by Andres Iniesta and Xavi. For the first time in so many years, the next ceremony might not see either of them win it. Yet the award might still stay at Barcelona if Luis Suarez manages to steal it from under their nose.
His inferior number of championships and awards means that Ronaldo often gets devalued. Or under-appreciated. It’s an extreme thing to say that Cristiano Ronaldo is underrated, and that’s not the right expression here. The way that we judge greatness in sports is by outcomes, and we shift the goalposts in conversations about greatness toward that which is determinable: wins and losses, titles recorded. That valuation will always see Ronaldo as the loser relative to his peers because it admonishes Ronaldo for things that are out of his control. Winning titles would mark him superior, as if winning is ever an individual feat.
Ronaldo gets discredited to an extreme degree because of this binary thinking. His accomplishments are bludgeoned with the reality that they don’t equate to anything more than individual statistics. He’s a phenomenal player on a team that routinely comes up short of greatness, and that’s often been used to suggest that he’s not as good as he really is.
Ronaldo should be judged relative to what has been in his control. As such, his complete destruction of the normal standards for goal-scorers -- scoring over 50 goals a season when 20 goals is considered great for others -- and his inhuman longevity. There’s never been another player like this.
For all his hardware, Messi’s legacy will be similarly undervalued because of his failure to win titles with Argentina. No matter how close Messi gets the team to the ultimate prize, their repeated failures are framed as an individual fault which will forever detract from Messi’s greatness despite all the other measures of his talent. As if being borderline divinity is not good enough because Gonzalo Higuain can’t score in finals.
There’s no standard criteria for the conversations of what makes a player the best. The Ballon d’Or award doesn’t follow a standard and we don’t either. The odd thing about MVP awards, for all their supposed reliance on measurable quantities, is that they seek to reward best individual player or the player most important and pivotal to his team, or some combination of both.
Our current standard seems to be a combination of individual ability and team success. But then again, Iniesta (2010) and Franck Ribery (2013) both lost in years that such a criteria should have seen them win.
So what we're left with are really murky ways to rank and reward greatness. Ways that can conveniently be changed depending on one's preference. If Ronaldo performs better than Messi one year, you only need to point to Barcelona's titles to say Messi is better. And if Messi and his team win a double, you can also use Ronaldo's individual stats to say that he is the superior. In one you separate the individual from the team, in the other, you hide him behind his compatriots. Both cases are ultimately dishonest.
These awards, like the conversations around them, can’t be objective. It’s impossible. They’re voted on and discussed by human beings and each person has his or her own personal leanings toward one player or the other. They’re inherently subjective even though we’d pretend that they are not. The votes are already cast way before the season even starts, and unless one of the players performs so well that it would look criminal to deny them the honor, the results fall back on individual bias.
The truth is that one needs a great team and exceptional teammates in order to have great individual success. Since that 2009-2010 season when Ronaldo arrived in Spain, Messi has appeared on that Ballon d’Or stage with a teammate or teammates four out of six times. Ronaldo, none. It isn’t a detriment to Messi’s ability but a truth about how team success helps individual success. After all, it would be stupid to suppose that a player having great teammates is a bad thing.
Real Madrid aren't some small club, they're the self-proclaimed greatest club in the world. They have an abundance of talent and even more money. They have world-class players surrounding Ronaldo, two who he mentioned as being on his level in Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema. Yet neither of them, nor any of his other teammates have shown up as candidates for the best player in the world.
It’s always just Ronaldo alone.
So another fine season is coming to an end. There’s still a Champions League final left for Ronaldo to play. He, and Real Madrid, can break Atletico Madrid’s heart once again and make the year a success. A European title would see them match Barcelona’s total since Ronaldo’s arrival. But while they go after that, Barca will be on the verge of a double and some might say two titles are better than one, regardless of which titles they are.
Barca might win and Messi (or Suarez) might be rewarded with the Ballon d’Or. As usual, all Ronaldo can do is be exceptional and then wait to see if that’s enough.
See More:
