What is Cristiano Ronaldo?

It is becoming clear that Cristiano Ronaldo is no longer Cristiano Ronaldo. The spirit is willing but the legs are going; the thrilling bursts are getting rarer. One of the greatest players of this or any other generation is fading from view, an increasingly static presence in an increasingly hyperactive game.

On the other hand, on Tuesday night he scored twice in Real Madrid’s 3-1 win over Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League, his 10th and 11th of the competition. As fade-outs go, it’s a noisy and relevant one. He’s definitely still something. But if Ronaldo isn’t Ronaldo anymore ... what is he?

Football is a team game, in which individuals combine to score goals and avoid conceding them. To this end, they work together: They move the ball around to create openings for their own side, and they move themselves around to destroy openings for the other lot. Some teams work together well, and others badly. Some accommodate individualists, and others don’t. And then there’s Ronaldo, who absents himself from all of that faffing around and just gets on with scoring goals.

It is, in some grand sense, not really fair. So much thought and work goes into the creation of teams, and then along he comes, with his grin and his haircut, rendering it all futile. It’s a bit like that scene in Escape to Victory, where Pelé — sorry, “Corporal Luis Fernandez” — interrupts a tactics meeting to suggest that it might be easier if he just dribbles round everybody and scores. Except, crucially, late Ronaldo doesn’t even need to bother with the first part. He just has to exist. And in it goes, off his knee.

Naturally, once the ball’s gone in off the knee, the only thing that can follow is the trademark celebration. And while it would be easy to take umbrage at this moment of purest Ronaldo, there is something quite endearing about that jump-twist-roar thing. It’s so transparent in its desires, in its attempts to manipulate the world, that it shoots straight through narcissism and ends up being weirdly sweet.

”Hello! I have scored a goal! Please pay attention as I present my iconic name and number to the part of the ground containing most cameras! And if this should happen to increase brand awareness or influence any future statue-building decisions that you might be taking at some point, why, that would be most coincidental!”

He’s like a small child that’s just discovered the concept of a practical joke, and can’t stop giggling about what they’re going to do to you. You just have to play along.

There are two broadly accepted opinions about Ronaldo. The first is that he is, with his celebration and his visible-from-space self-regard, a bit of a berk. The second is that he is, to borrow Rob Smyth’s lovely phrase, a “freak of nurture” — that he worked and worked and worked to make himself the very best Cristiano Ronaldo he could possibly be, and that he succeeded.

What’s interesting is the comfortable co-existence of the two. It is often assumed that the latter precludes the former: That young footballers, if they want to make the most of their talents, have to dial down the berkishness. The ego must be sacrificed on the altar of self-improvement, as Confucius might have said if he’d ever devoted himself to the mysteries of the knuckleball free kick.

Sometimes this advice is well-meaning; sometimes it’s code for “I am an old boring football man and I don’t like it when young people do dabbing.” Either way, Ronaldo is living proof that you don’t have to stop acting like you’re the best, in order to be the best. What works for Ronaldo might not work for everybody, of course; that’s the “freak” bit. But it does at the very least suggest that it’s all a little more complicated than “stop dabbing, stop swaggering, stop doing adverts, stop getting haircuts, stop being a berk, and you’ll get better.”

Consider the evidence. He’s big. He’s shiny. He loves a pint of cool refreshing Gazprom. And even when he’s a terrible advert for everything that’s wrong with modern football, he’s still better than almost everything else.

Also, you just know that he’s got his own song all about how amazing he is. He probably nicked the tune. Die Meister. The best one. Le grand fromage. Ronaldo!