Ronaldo and Rooney's careers can be traced by the films of their lives

[TanyaT]

Cristiano Ronaldo's rising Hollywood star shows he is in different orbit to Wayne Rooney

Rooney was once the senior partner but whereas he was interviewed by Gary Lineker, Ronaldo's film is a big-budget production by the makers of Senna


By Jim White
Telegraph
6:39PM BST 15 Oct 2015


It may well be unlikely, given the taste you demonstrate in reading matter, but were you one of Cristiano Ronaldo’s 32.8 million followers on Instagram, you will have recently been the recipient of a blizzard of snaps.

Since the start of the season the Real Madrid forward has posted a new selfie on the site most days. There have been self-portraits of him in bed, of him alongside gurning team-mates, of him preparing for a night out while wearing a suit apparently snaffled from the wardrobe of the Godfather movies.

If it seems uncharacteristically self-obsessed behaviour for a man renowned throughout the game for his modesty, we now know the reason for it. This is not mere narcissism on display as there is a commercial purpose. On Nov 9 a new film reaches our cinema screens.

Produced by the team who made the biographical movies Senna and Amy, like those works it carries a single name title: Ronaldo. And the player has been doing his best to publicise it in the most immediate of ways: by promoting himself.

The film is subtitled “A Year In The Life Of The World’s Best Footballer”, an insistence that suggests it is unlikely to gain many DVD sales in one particular household in Barcelona. Describing itself as “astonishing, intimate, definitive”, it reveals much about the living arrangements of the great man. It is all here: the private jets, the swanky Madrid restaurants, the gazillion dollar apartments. Not to mention the coruscating wisdom of his agent.

“Nothing is impossible my friend,” Jorge Mendes tells our hero at one point. Ronaldo’s principal sponsor, Adidas, must be kicking itself that it never thought of that as a slogan.

Plus there is a lot of laughter. Ronaldo cackling to himself after telling the camera he is the best player in the world, or Ronaldo smirking after his mother has just insisted he was always the best player around when he was growing up. Though he does not look too happy when his son says: “I’m going to be a goalkeeper. OK dad?” “A goalkeeper?” retorts his stern-faced father. “Are you joking?”

Apostasy, it is clear, will not be tolerated in the Ronaldo household. Watching this self-indulgent gloss-job it is hard not to compare with Gary Lineker’s gentle soft-soap observation of Wayne Rooney broadcast recently.

Rooney and Ronaldo are of similar vintage, the Englishman turns 30 next week, eight months after his former Manchester United team-mate. But where once they were on a similar trajectory, their paths have taken significantly different turns.

At the 2006 World Cup, when they squared up to each other on the Gelsenkirchen turf, Rooney was the senior figure, superior in renown, importance and value. While he was already the finished article, Ronaldo still had much to learn, not least in the art of winking subterfuge.

Nine years on, Rooney remains locally important, but Ronaldo has gone global. Even the way in which they are presented in celluloid form tells of their relative status.

Rooney was the subject of a TV show broadcast in his own homeland; Ronaldo has had a big budget movie made about him, given a worldwide cinema release. While Rooney is a telly star, Ronaldo is Hollywood.

But the most telling difference between the two pieces of work is this.

What struck most forcefully when watching Lineker’s gently engaging piece was the constant poignant reminder of what a great player Rooney once was. What strikes when watching this latest film is what a great player Ronaldo still is.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/foo...ne-Rooney.html