What Makes a Lionel Messi or a Cristiano Ronaldo?
One of them is reserved, quietly spoken, at times seemingly almost apologetic, while the other is loud, gregarious with a self-confidence that some feel borders on the arrogant.
But don’t be fooled; appearances are deceptive. There is more in the make-up of Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo that brings them together than sets them apart, and it’s precisely all of these things that contrive to make the two maestros arguably the two greatest footballers in the history of the game.
The late, great, George Best once said of Ronaldo, “There have been a few players described as the new George Best over the years, but this is the first time it’s been a compliment to me.”
Messi’s former boss, Pep Guardiola, said of Messi, “People buy tickets to see him play, and he is leaving something unique. I have never had a player like this. He is superior to the rest. He has a special gift.”
As someone who has written a book on Messi and is presently engaged in the process of writing one on Ronaldo, I am often asked, what makes the difference? What makes them better than the rest?
While it’s safe to assume that no amount of dedication, commitment and sacrifice will make a bad player succeed, what is certain is that an absence of this footballing "holy trinity" will guarantee that a good player will fail.
Both Messi and Ronaldo knew from the very beginning that the only thing they wanted was to become not just good footballers but also the best.
When Ronaldo came to Manchester United, he would tell anyone prepared to listen that he was going to be the greatest footballer in the world. Messi also said it, maybe without quite the swagger of his Portuguese adversary, but nonetheless the fact that he was prepared to give himself painful growth-hormone injections on a daily basis to help him achieve his goals served as due notice of his intentions.
At Manchester United, Ronaldo would sneak into the gym to do extra training in order to hone his body into the condition he knew it had to be to achieve his goals. At the Ballon d’Or gala in 2012, Messi said, “I am used to being the last person to leave. I like being in the dressing room. I love football, and training sessions are part of football.”
Both know the truth of Thomas Edison’s famous saying that “success is 1 per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration.”
Both come from countries either side of the Atlantic Ocean (Argentina and Portugal), and both know the feelings of pain, loss and loneliness created by leaving home, friends and families in search of their dreams—and both knew right from the start that was the path they had chosen. Failure was not an option. In the words of Ronaldo himself, “Without football, my life is worth nothing.”
And that is also why, to this day, they surround themselves with the security blanket that is their family and very closest of friends—because as they have made their ways up the footballing food chain, that has been the only real constancy in their life, the only thing they have felt they ever really completely trusted.
Ronaldo dedicated his Ballon d’Or wins to his mother and also to his father. “When I win awards,” he once said, “I think of my father.”
“The one thing I really dislike is being alone,” he also once revealingly and touchingly said.
Messi’s closeness with his family is there to see every time he scores a goal and raises his hands to the sky to thank his grandmother for everything she did for him when she was alive, and it was there every day he spoke to his mother back home in Argentina from his new home in Barcelona.
In terms of ambition, competitiveness and focus, both Messi and Ronaldo are without equals. “Leo is very special,” said Gerard Piqué of his Barcelona team-mate. “When he loses a game, you think, 'Whoa, I wouldn’t like to be his wife, or girlfriend'.
“Not winning, not scoring, hurts him badly. It will take him a day or two or three to get over this wall of silence, but he can’t help it.”
Ronaldo is no different.
And over and above everything is that desire to win. “He has three Champions League [titles], but he wants four,” says former Barcelona team-mate Silvinho, while his fellow Argentinian Martin Demichelis says, “He’s competitive even in the Friends of Messi against the Rest of the World! In one of the games he said to us, 'Come on now. Let’s play seriously. I’m getting bored'.”
Fellow Portuguese Luis Figo, who is more than qualified to talk about footballing greatness, summed Ronaldo up when he said of him, “Ronaldo can do whatever he likes as a footballer. There are some things he does with the ball that make me touch my head and wonder how he did it.”
But ultimately it was Quique Dominguez. Leo’s former coach at Newell’s Old Boys summed it up perfectly. “To become successful is like the three legs of a table: ability, dedication and luck,” the implication being of course that if one of those legs is missing or is taken off, the table crashes to the ground.
Emile Zola said that “the artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work,” while Stephen King hit the nail on the head when he wrote, ”Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter."
Perhaps at the end of the day what makes the difference is not just about Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo’s desire to succeed but more about their refusal to accept the possibility of failure.
.png?w=600 "Ranking KD Trade Ideas, Landing Spots 📍")