Cristiano Ronaldo’s Real Madrid plays Ludogorets on Tuesday.
His team has already qualified for the next round of the Champions League, in first place, thereby maximizing all possible outcomes from the game it’s about to play. The fixture, therefore, for Real, is an empty midweek obligation that just has to be met—a chance to relax because, for once, Real’s rivals can’t steal some progress if it fails and it, in turn, can’t steal some progress from them if they fail. It’s almost a day off.
But none of this loosening-up talk applies to Ronaldo. As long as he’s allowed to play, there’ll be no relaxing for the favourite to get his hands on this year’s Ballon d’Or. For him, the game against Ludogorets operates in exactly the opposite way: As a reminder that there are no days off for a player trying to break every record going, because there can’t be.
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Quite simply, the thing with Ronaldo is that he can never relax, because he’s made it his business to score more goals than anyone else, ever—and the inherent extremity of that task doesn’t allow for breaks. It goes like this: Within the masochistic goal-chasing game in which Ronaldo has become embroiled, no competitive fixture is free from the obligation to score.
Within the “Ronaldo Paradigm,” no game is meaningless anymore. Rather, every game Ronaldo plays now comes with both the opportunity to chase and the burden of chasing records, because whenever he isn’t scoring, someone else, somewhere else, might be. The pressure is absolutely consistent and completely brutal because the aspiration is so extreme. Only one person can own a record at time.
So, you realize, Ronaldo can’t stop. Even when his huge responsibility to his team is momentarily put on hold as against Ludogorets in a game that doesn’t matter to Real, his personal run at acquiring adjectives such as “top,” “highest” and “most” next to his name requires a permanent chase, and the mindset that comes with it.
Relentlessness, like abs training, has become a necessity. This is the context in which Ronaldo will play Ludagorets.
But it goes further still. Because Ronaldo isn’t chasing abstract or historical records on Tuesday—he’s chasing Lionel Messi’s records, and the scale of that confrontation almost clarifies itself these days. Against the kind of goalscoring excellence that Messi offers up, we are literally talking about a scenario where any game in which Ronaldo doesn’t score is a disappointment of sorts, and less than three goals kind of is, as well.
This weekend he hit a La Liga record 23rd hat trick. Which was great. But the next day Messi hit one too and got back to within two hat tricks of his record-based-rival. Basically, both players have been so prolific this season that Ronaldo has no time to enjoy the latest benchmark anymore, for fear that any time expended on anything other than setting new ones would allow either Messi back in or to move further in front.
The battle is constant. And of course that has to include a theoretically dead rubber against Ludogorets in the Champions League, the competition in which Messi and Ronaldo’s goalscoring is most evenly matched. But not as some minor detail. Oh, no. The “Ronaldo Paradigm” is a warped world, involving a dangerously close competition between two genius-types, and inevitably that creates odd situations.
So, conversely, within this “Ronaldo Paradigm,” the less important the game and the less impressive the opponent (Ludogorets is already out of Europe for this season), the more pressure there is for Ronaldo to score. Because if you’re playing in an easier game than Messi, you don’t simply expect to score more or have a bigger opportunity to do so; you have to score more, or the Barcelona star will later when he plays his easier team.
Inside the “Ronaldo Paradigm,” little games are the new big games; Ludogorets is the new Team to Beat.
This is what happens when you operate at extremes like these. Ronaldo is pushing at records that no one else except Messi has touched—because they’re so hard to touch—and what comes with that are some new, weird things starting to happen.
New rules are turning up but they’re all moving in one direction: They’re all creating more pressure to form new frontiers of brilliance. Almost every single moment on a football pitch now counts for Ronaldo, which is ludicrous.
In the end, Ronaldo might know that Messi, on 74 Champions League goals, is playing French champions PSG on Wednesday, and that might slow him down a bit. But that can’t, shouldn’t and won’t relax the Real Madrid man just four goals behind him (70) in this absurd dash at the record books. Instead, if we know Ronaldo at all, he’ll be desperate to take his slightly bigger chance against Ludogorets.
There can be no days off for this man.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter