When Cristiano Ronaldo rocked up at Manchester United in a Lamborghini this week, it felt just like the good old days.
Of course, Ronaldo is a different man now at the age of 36 from the one who left United 12 years ago. A father of four, a five-time winner of the Ballon d’Or and an even bigger star after conquering Europe with Real Madrid and Portugal.
Still, it was almost possible to forget the passage of time when he returned to Carrington looking like a million dollars: tanned, immaculately manicured and capable of passing for someone considerably younger.
Cristiano Ronaldo is set to make his second debut for Manchester United against Newcastle
Ronaldo arrived with the Man United team at their hotel to prepare for Saturday's game
For Ronaldo, too, the surroundings will seem very familiar. He always made time to talk to the staff at United and was genuinely happy to see some old faces when he reported to the training ground on Tuesday.
The rented seven-bedroom property where he is staying with his partner Georgina Rodriguez and young family is only a short distance from his old house in Alderley Edge.
He moved there from nearby Woodford after the 2006 World Cup — amid the national uproar over his role in Wayne Rooney’s sending-off against Portugal — and only sold it in 2019, nearly a decade after moving to Spain.
The upmarket village hasn’t changed much either. It has always been a hotbed for Premier League footballers. The high street butcher used to put adverts for steak in his front window written in Spanish purely for the benefit of Ronaldo’s former United team-mate Carlos Tevez.
The Portuguese star’s five-bedroom, three-storey mansion briefly became home to Anderson and Nani when they joined the club in the summer of 2007 and was the setting, not two months later, for the lurid tale of a pool party with five call girls that found its way into the tabloids.
Then there was the time he crashed his £200,000 Ferrari in the Manchester Airport tunnel on his way to training shortly before leaving United in January 2009, having previously ploughed a Porsche Cayenne into someone’s front garden on the same stretch of road in Wilmslow.
Ronaldo was young and reckless back then, a typical footballer enjoying the trappings of fame.
He was, however, unique in so many other ways. An obsessive hell-bent on success, one with a relentless desire to better himself and become the best.
Patrice Evra’s favourite story about Ronaldo followed an invitation for lunch at the house in Alderley Edge.
‘There was a bit of salad, plain white chicken, no juice, just water,’ recalls Evra. ‘After that he said, “Let’s go in the garden and play two-touch. After that let’s go for a swim. After that, sauna and Jacuzzi”. I said, “Cristiano, why didn’t we just stay at the training ground?”.’
Ronaldo was the first player at Man United to have their own personal chef cooking high-protein meals
Ronaldo once nicknamed noodle, worked hard on and off the pitch to improve his physique
Other team-mates were already familiar with the youngster’s dedication to his craft. Ronaldo was the first player at the club to have a personal chef. Early on, a teenager so skinny that he was nicknamed Noodle in Portugal challenged United’s power and development coach Simon Clegg to help him become the supreme athlete we see today.
He would spend hours practising his tricks in private at Carrington where no one could witness any mistakes. The boy who used to wear weights around his ankles when running in the streets of Quinta do Falcao, the neighbourhood where he grew up on the island of Madeira, did the same in training at United.
‘Doing fast feet with ankle weights, he took training to another level,’ says Darren Fletcher. ‘The lads were laughing but he didn’t care. They saw it as a bit of banter but deep down they respected that work-rate and desire and the sheer determination to be the best player in the world.’
Ronaldo used resistance bands to strengthen his ankle ligaments knowing that a player with fancy feet and a penchant for stepovers in the early days was bound to be on the wrong end of brutal tackles — even from his team-mates.
‘He used to get snapped in training. People would kick the hell out of him,’ admits Rio Ferdinand. ‘We didn’t bully him. We all saw the huge potential he had. He came over and his first thought was to entertain but we wanted to win. We kicked it out of him, the entertainment factor, to get the goals and assists.’
Ferdinand remembers Ruud van Nistelrooy, then the main man at United, flouncing off the training ground because he was infuriated by Ronaldo’s tricks. It was the start of an enmity that would see the Dutchman eventually leave amid accusations of favouritism, but also a lesson that the younger man took on board.
‘Ruud was making runs into the box and the ball wasn’t coming in because Cristiano was doing about 50 stepovers,’ says Ferdinand. ‘Ruud went crazy screaming, “He shouldn’t be on the pitch, he should be in the circus” and he walked in.
‘Cristiano got upset. “Why’s he talking to me that way?” But he realised that Ruud might actually be right. It wasn’t immediate, it was over time. All of a sudden
