Placing Ronaldo and Fabregas Within the Evolutionary Trajectory of Soccer

Cristiano Ronaldo, 24, and Cesc Fabregas, 21, are emblematic of modern soccer. Barely on the backside of puberty, the two have become indispensable players on two of the biggest clubs in the world. They share boyish good looks and European-underwear-model hairdos. Despite their similarities, however, these two wunderkinds have evolved in very different ways. Together, their examples will change the sport.

When Ronaldo entered the public eye he was the cock-sure, crybaby prince— Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator—who we, at least at first, loved to hate. He came on the scene as if everybody—referees, players and fans—owed him something they weren’t giving. He would sell straw-legged flops with a pout and wet eyes. He bickered with veteran teammates about taking free kicks. He played with a reckless disregard for fundamental soccer and the benefit of his team to show off his twinkle-toed feet and You-Tube-ready tricks.

Seething in front of televisions, I used to count his turnovers in the defensive third, wanting to get on the field just so I could break his toothpick-sized legs. I predicted that United would dump him after two seasons of painfully inefficient football. I would have.

Thank god I’m not a manager. Sir Alex Ferguson showed consummate faith in the talent, and there has never been an athlete on this planet about whom I have more resolutely changed my opinion. Besides becoming arguably the best player in the world, Ronaldo has even begun to shed his abrasive, crybaby demeanor. Taking cues from Rooney, he chases on the defensive end, even tackling once in a while. He wins headers over center backs twice his girth. He makes smart and incisive passes. And despite all the harsh tackles aimed his way, he has established himself as a relentless and surprisingly durable force.

Now everybody does owe him something, and he plays as if he always knew it, a smile-cracked pout when a defender commits a foul to prevent him from skipping to goal. None of the other superstars on his team ask questions when he lines up for spot kicks, which he snaps toward net with some freakish combination of swerve and knuckle.

During the 1998 World Cup, Adidas ran an ad in which a tour guide led the way through a future fictional player’s back yard. The guide said something like: “And this is where he perfected his revolutionary kick, the double helix.” Maybe it’s the modern balls, but Ronaldo has proved that Impossible is, indeed, nothing. In a Champions League game against Sporting Portugal last season, he scored the clinching goal with a free kick that looked as if two separate magnetic forces guided the ball, which spiraled into bottom corner of the net.

Instead of turning his moves down to make them more manageable, Ronaldo has learned to use them effectively, absorbing them into a repertoire of technical brilliance. He has made routine what were once once eye-catching tricks like back-heel through balls, behind-the-leg crosses, and behind-the-leg direction changes. They are no longer disgusting or ineffective displays of pomp. They beguile. They slice defenses apart. And kids around the world try to emulate them.

Ronaldo, like no other player in the modern game, has raised the bar of possibility. Where as a player like Ronaldinho showcases skills that those with good touch, passion, and enough time can grasp, Ronaldo’s warp-speed moves come from a more supernatural realm, where time and space have different properties than we are used to. It’s as if he’s transferred all elements of personality, some of which might have even been endearing, to the shimmering gloss of his technical makeup. As vacuous as he may be, Ronaldo suggests that in the modern game personality only slows you down. Sports evolve by getting faster, and Ronaldo has upped the anti. A hummingbird that knows no stasis, he darts sideways and then back to the same spot in a blink, vibrating above the context of a game, irrespective of the rooted defenders and teammates surrounding him.

Ronaldo also possesses a quality crucial to both his own evolution and that of the game; he is hungry. Over the past few years his facial expression during games has changed from a wet-eyed adolescent looking for pity to a moist-eyed, near-adult who knows he doesn’t need it. Maybe it’s his long-necked complexion, which brings to mind a fledgling gawking for food, but Ronaldo looks famished compared to other superstars. He doesn’t simply want the ball; he needs it for his team to win. This hunger clashes with the complacency that other superstars like Ronaldinho have slipped into over the years. While Ronaldinho’s carefree attitude may add to his magical appeal, it also makes us believe that he could do more.

Maybe Ronaldo’s transformation came as much from circumstance as from within, from playing under Sir Alex Ferguson in the Premiership, a league that doesn’t forgive complacency. The league’s relentless expectations have forced him to constantly bring his best and to keep improving. The league’s physicality forced him to develop armor. And the league’s pace made him even faster. Also, Sir Alex Ferguson has provided Ronaldo the magic combination of guidance and freedom. Ferguson has prompted Ronaldo to be more intelligent and conservative in his own half. At the same time, Ronaldo gets more artistic license on the attack than anyone in the game. Good idea. He teleports around the field, free to exploit weak points in an opponent’s defense. As a result, he took the scoring title in Premiership last year, as a wing midfielder, by an absurd margin. This year he has more quietly topped the table again.

Messi serves as the most apt counterpart to Ronaldo in the modern game. Another mutant, Messi possesses similarly freakish speed. He plays a similar position. And compared to Ronaldo’s dives and flashy moves, Messi shrugs off challenges while using simple, efficient jukes, and an innate understanding of the game.

But Fabregas counters Ronaldo on a larger, more ecological, scale. The opposite of a freak, Fabregas has no stunning athletic abilities. He is one of the most unassuming players in the game. While Ronaldo conjures some pomp bird splaying blinding feathers, as Brian Phillips suggests in his portrait of the winger in The Run of Play, Fabregas might conjure a kind of spirit-organism instead of simply an animal. A mushroom, or the fruiting body of some highly intricate subterraneous mycelial network, Fabregas seems more essential to the life of his team than any higher-order animal. He recycles errant possessions, keeps attacks alive, and gives them the nutrients to bloom. Highly sensitive to the requirements of everyone around him, Fabregas binds every element of his team together: backs to strikers, wings to wings, past to future, nothing to life.

Good central midfielders do this. But Fabregas plays with a sort of contradictory brilliance, somehow all the more brilliant for the way he deflects attention. Instead of soaking up the spotlight when he has the ball, he deflects it in a way that forces us to pull the spotlight back, to uncover light and a connectedness of movement and understanding that we didn’t see before. While appearing every bit the pretty boy as Ronaldo, while probably wreaking just as much of gelled hair and cologne up close, he plays with a modesty that makes irrelevant any highlight reals or snap shots of his game. The fluidity of his game makes it more significant than the the sum of its parts. He makes complex plays look easy, with a smoothness that makes them mundane, as natural to his being as blinking, or pumping blood. He links these plays together, one by one throughout the course of a game, until we see the larger picture and purpose of his work and his team. In this way, he connects Arsenal and their fans as one body, as one collective consciousness of their beautiful purpose.

To appreciate Fabregas, you also need to see the context in which he plays, how he reads and pushes the narrative of any game, how he controls the ebb and flow of all the players around him. The cornerstone of Wenger’s offense, he makes Arsenal’s gears hum with a cool, measured efficiency that he holds the levers to. He links quick passes to diffuse pressure. He uses a deft first touch to evade a defender and switch the field. He slips perfectly weighted balls behind a back line. His own game has a million predecessors. And as professor Wenger’s understudy, he will test the limits of its’ perfection.

Fabregas, like history itself, is all context – the opposite of Ronaldo, whose game functions as a sum of unrelated clips. Ronaldo is one sparkling pop single after another; Fabregas is an album that reinvents itself over time. In this way watching Fabregas is somehow so much more edifying than watching Ronaldo do the impossible. Fabregas helps us better understand the game – its’ roots and its’ future – the way its’ relentless simplicity belies its’ indecipherable complexity.

As with Ronaldo, Fabregas’ accelerated development could only have come in the Premiership. He has said so himself. If Fabregas chose to stay with the Barcelona youth team, where he trained alongside Messi in the midfield, he would have had to wait his turn behind a pecking order of talented central midfielders: Deco, Xavi, Iniesta, Motta. At Arsenal, Wenger threw Fabregas into the fire. As a result, at 18 Fabregas was a man-child, one of the most consistent players in the game.

Unlike Ronaldo, Fabregas doesn’t get embroiled in clashes with opponents, referees, or fans. He doesn’t show a self-conscious awareness of the dozens of television cameras idolizing his every step. For Ronaldo, like many other players, maybe the fracases with referees and the winks toward cameras serve as evidence of caring too much. But Fabregas’ isolation from these external distractions reaffirms his Zen-like focus on himself and his place within a larger schema. When he scored the 25-yard clincher against A.C. Milan at the San Siro last year he didn’t taunt the fans or dance around the pitch. He ran over to hug his coach.

While Ronaldo might represent the game’s biggest evolutionary jump, providing new laws that require time to test properly, Fabregas reminds us all how the game can and will remain tied to the past, how it depends on the same beautiful laws it always has to move forward. If only we could crossbreed the two. Or maybe we already have, and we call him Messi…◊

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