World Cup diary: The problem with watching Cristiano Ronaldo

The problem with watching Cristiano Ronaldo play soccer is that he is Cristiano Ronaldo, and he doesn’t play soccer so much as he plays himself: Cristiano Ronaldo, super star. This problem has only grown more acute as he has refined his game, playing closer and closer to goal, touching the ball less and less, every involvement carrying that much extra weight in his attempt to reveal the version of himself he wants us all to believe is the real one.

It isn’t so uncommon for a player to reach a point in his career when he becomes more than the player he is, when the things he does become functions of the things he has done, the ways he has made us feel, the discussions he has made us have. But it’s very rare for a player to seem as enthusiastic about having reached this point as Ronaldo does. And so how else to interpret his many gesticulations if not as acts of theater, a further refinement of the character?

At the press conference following Portugal’s win on Wednesday, Ronaldo arrived, unannounced as far as I could hear, to answer two questions, both of them asked by his FIFA handler, both of them entirely pointless: How does it feel to be the tournament’s top scorer and what are Portugal’s expectations going forward? Then, after some unsurprisingly vacuous answers, with a smile and a wave, he was gone. The point, it seemed, was simply to be seen.

Or perhaps not. This is the other problem with Ronaldo. The gravitational pull of his celebrity has grown so powerful as to have turned him into a sort of explanatory black hole. We have questions. We need answers. And there is Ronaldo, big enough and bright enough a star to be whatever we need him to be in the moment. How good is he? He is good enough to make us stupid, which is about as good as it gets.

Next: The best player on every team at the World Cup

He scored the winning goal against Morocco inside five minutes, and spent much of the rest of the match giving the ball away, getting fouled, complaining to the referee, getting booed by the fans (Lionel Messi’s name rang around the Luzhniki Stadium more than once), standing dramatically over free-kicks he would shortly hit straight into the wall, winning the Budweiser Man of the Match award.

Among the many questions raised by Ronaldo’s late-career transformation into maybe the greatest goalscoring number 9 in the history of the game, perhaps none is more interesting than this: Why didn’t he do it sooner? If this isn’t the best version of Ronaldo we’ve ever seen, it certainly feels like the one most true to his character. And for him, one senses, that is the same thing.