What Drives Cristiano Ronaldo?

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This has been a spectacular year for Cristiano Ronaldo, but today, on this beautiful spring morning in Madrid, the superstar striker is not happy.

The 29-year-old phenom smashed goal-scoring records, won the prestigious FIFA Ballon d’Or award for the world’s best player, captained his native Portugal into the World Cup, and led his professional team, Real Madrid, toward an unprecedented 10th European title in the Champions League.

But something is nagging at Ronaldo. Even from up here on the viewing balcony, I can see the uneasiness in his eyes, the hesitation in his stride. Some teammates call Ronaldo El Ansia–“the Anxious One”–and he certainly looks anxious today. Something is off, a niggle, a crimp, a twinge down in the fast-twitch muscle fibers of his thigh.

The Real Madrid complex in Valdebebas, the neighborhood where the team trains, has come alive. The field sprinklers have just shut off, and the parking lot is thronged with sleek Audi sports cars. Ronaldo and his teammates–a $260 million cast of global luminaries like Gareth Bale, Angel di Maria, Sergio Ramos, and Marcelo Vieira da Silva–have marched onto the immaculate grass and begun training for the final games of the La Liga season in Spain. Swallows dart through the blue sky, and the close air resounds with the fat thunk of soccer balls swerving toward the net.

The cranes and glass towers of Madrid’s modern skyline peek over the bleachers, but this is a closed practice, open only to a few invited guests who’ve passed through a gauntlet of security. On the balcony with me is a group of teenage soccer players from China, who by special arrangement have come to train with Real Madrid’s youth academy. Every time Ronaldo runs by, their cameras raise in unison: “Ronaldo!” Like kids all over the world, these teens have memorized his moves, his mannerisms, his signature step overs, and his ritual for taking free kicks. The boys try to keep their cool, but it’s a little like watching old clips of teenage girls reacting to a young Elvis.

Ronaldo practices with the team for a half hour, but then a stern-eyed trainer pulls him aside and puts him through a series of stress tests, scrutinizing the muscles of his left leg as if he were a prize thoroughbred with a slightly suspicious gait. After 15 minutes, it appears Ronaldo has failed the tests.

Carlo Ancelotti, Real’s manager, not wanting to risk further injury to his greatest (and most expensive) asset, dismisses him from practice. Ronaldo strides off the field, pouting, gesticulating in disapproval. He wants to play, but he’s been banished to the locker room and, presumably, the massage table.

I’m supposed to meet him later, down in one of the press rooms. After keeping me waiting for an hour, he shows up with a retinue of dour-faced minders. He swaggers in and sits down, fresh from the showers, diamond studs in his ears, spiky hair gelled to perfection. His sideburns are crisp black daggers, and a hefty watch glints at his wrist.

Ronaldo is definitely the preening peacock everyone says he is–but I can sense a vulnerable side too, a nervous energy that pulls at him like an undertow. The leg injury, which will plague him for the rest of the season and at the World Cup, is clearly weighing on him today. Ronaldo has scored more than 240 goals since coming to Real Madrid in 2009, and over the years he’s won just about every title and trophy soccer has to offer. This year alone, he’s scored an incredible 51 goals for Real. But with two games left in the season, he’s not satisfied.

He never will be.

People who know Ronaldo say he’s a work in progress, that he’s obsessed with perfecting himself, that his thirst is unquenchable. Ronaldo wouldn’t disagree. “I always try to improve,” he tells me. “Tomorrow I will be better than today, and next year will be better than this one. If I score 50 goals, I want 55. Some people say I’m too serious on the pitch, not smiling and so on. It is because I’m focused 100 percent on every game. I always want more and more.”

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It’s not easy being Cris Ronaldo. His quest for perfection, his lust for the highest stratospheres of glory, and the powerful mix of self-love and self-criticism stirring within him make for a stout psychic cocktail. He lives in a pressure-cooker world, partly of his own making. He runs on what he calls “a special adrenaline.” He’s spent much of his professional life justifying his own exorbitant price tag, and it’s left him fragile, skittish, overexcited. Sit with him for a while, and you realize that this is one hothouse orchid.

At times, Ronaldo seems almost hounded by the demands of his own excellence. He craves the biggest possible stage and sets outlandishly high personal goals, which he then must outrun. When he plays, noted British soccer writer Barney Ronay, you sense that “he is being chased not just by the opposition but by everyone in the stadium.” There’s no doubting his talent: Cristiano Ronaldo is widely regarded (along with his archrival, Lionel Messi) as the best player on the planet, and he will likely be counted as one of the sport’s greatest ever–in the pantheon with Maradona and Pele. Ronaldo is a complete player, a man who can do it all: He’s deadly with both feet, his dribbling is cunning and artful, his strikes are blistering, his moves can scramble a defender’s brains, his wobbling free kicks are magisterial, and–when Ronaldo’s given room to run–his pace is nearly unmatched.

“When you look at the game today, there’s such a premium on the physical aspect–speed, strength, endurance,” Michael Bradley, midfielder for the U.S. national team, said right before the USA-Portugal World Cup game in June. “He is a guy who checks all those boxes. And then when you talk about his technical ability–how good in the air he is–he’s somebody who can make the difference at any moment.” Bradley found that out in the 95th minute of that game, when Ronaldo’s pinpoint cross led to a goal that tied Team USA.

“The sirens really go off when he receives a ball in space, out wide, with time,” says ESPN commentator Alexi Lalas, a retired defender for the U.S. national team. “No defender wants to see that. As a spectator, I hold my breath because the potential for something magical to happen is there.”

The soccer cognoscenti put Ronaldo in a category all his own. “Ronaldo is not of this earth,” said Jose Mourinho, the manager of Chelsea FC. A “wizard,” asserted Manchester United’s former manager, Sir Alex Ferguson. “Cristiano Ronaldo is the most gifted player I ever managed.”

“Watching him is like watching something else,” said Tottenham striker Emmanuel Adebayor. “It’s like playing on the PlayStation.”

The sports agent Jorge Mendes, who has managed Ronaldo’s career, gushed about his star as if he were an engineering project: “It will be impossible to construct another Cristiano Ronaldo for the next 500 years.”

Ronaldo’s absolute mastery of the game was perhaps on fullest display in November of last year in Stockholm, where Portugal was playing Sweden in a must-win World Cup qualifier. While the home fans screamed, “Messi! Messi! Messi!”–a taunt calculated to unnerve Ronaldo–he smashed in three brilliant goals and snuffed out Sweden’s World Cup hopes. When he scored his second one, he pointed to the ground and roared, “I am here!”

He certainly was. “To be the best you can be, you have to be focused,” Ronaldo tells me. “Training your mind is very important. Then distractions are no longer distractions. You can remain calm if you are confident. The harder you work and the more committed you are, the more confident you become.”

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On top of all his prodigious talent, Ronaldo has a chiseled physique that turns heads and makes sponsors salivate. In this sense, he’s a better, more fully realized David Beckham. Ronaldo is not just a great athlete but a model for how a great athlete should look–the guy, it seems, has abs inside his abs. He has become soccer’s most recognizable, popular, and marketable megastar; deals with Nike, Samsung, and Herbalife, among others, pushed his total earnings to $73 million last year. “I’ve never sensed a buzz around a player as I do with Ronaldo walking through a crowd,” says Ray Hudson, a commentator for the beIN Sports network. “The man could start a riot in a convent.” So far he’s stayed clear of the altar, but he does have a longtime, not to mention fabulously hot, girlfriend: Irina Shayk, a Russian supermodel who has appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

On the other hand, a lot of people just can’t stand Ronaldo. They’re put off by his showboating. Some dislike the way he scowls and sneers and smirks, his habit of pouting and even weeping on the field. Still others hate his flashy jewelry, the beefcake photos, the too-much-hair-product. Over the years, Ronaldo has been called a football pinup, a glamour boy, and a variety of disparaging nicknames: Mr. Slick. The Sly Senor. Crybaby. Nancy Boy.

Mostly, though, people seem to hate Ronaldo for his ego, which, in fairness, can be staggering.

He’s worn shin guards decorated with pictures of himself. He believes that his jersey number–7–carries mythical powers. He has his own underwear line, CR7, with designer Richard Chai and Danish boutique brand JBS. At his seven-bedroom mansion in the swank La Finca neighborhood of Madrid, he has reportedly adorned the windows, furniture, and kitchenware with CR7 insignias. When he was asked why crowds jeered at him, he famously replied, “People are jealous of me. Because I am rich, handsome, and a great player.”

In December of last year, in his hometown of Funchal on the Portuguese island of Madeira, 540 miles out in the Atlantic, Ronaldo opened a shrine to himself–the Museu CR7. This brazen “me temple” is stuffed with his memorabilia, trophies, signed jerseys, and soccer balls, even a waxwork statue. He has built a footballer’s Graceland. Of course, plenty of athletes, especially prizefighters, stoke their confidence with elaborate trophy rooms. Floyd May-weather has his championship belts; Lance Armstrong, his framed Tour de France jerseys. By curating his greatest moments at the Museu CR7, Ronaldo has taken it a step further: He’s building up his confidence with bricks and mortar. “My mother taught me to always be myself. Some people may like it and some may not, and that’s fine,” he tells me. “I think it helped me to develop a strong character.”

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It was on Madeira, in the volcanic hills just above Funchal, that Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro first learned to love the game of soccer. He was named after Ronald Reagan, whom his parents admired. The family was poor. Young Cristiano shared a room with his three siblings in a prefab bungalow so cramped they parked the washing machine on the sheet-metal roof. His mom, Dolores, cleaned houses. His dad, Dinis, a gardener, had a drinking problem and another affliction: futbol.

With his parents’ encouragement, little Cris learned to play in the narrow streets around his house. This is how his footwork developed: He grew tired of chasing errant balls down steep hills. According to Ronaldo, by Luca Caioli, the biggest worry was mean old Mr. Agostinho, who doted on his garden. When a ball landed in his yard, he would threaten to puncture it. Cris learned an important lesson: If you want to keep playing, you’d better not make a mistake.

In the junior leagues of Funchal, he soon became a standout. His dad was the “kit man” for the team, handling the uniforms and equipment and pushing Cris to greater glory. People called the boy Abelhinha (“Little Bee”) for the high-energy way he scurried over the field. He couldn’t stand to lose. He would cry if he didn’t win or if a teammate didn’t feed him the ball. When he was 12, he flew to the mainland for a trial with the youth academy of Sporting Lisbon, one of Portugal’s top clubs. It was his first airplane ride, and he cried from homesickness and the painful pressure in his ears.

But the lanky prospect was an instant hit. “This one’s different,” the coach whispered to a colleague. “He’s something special.” And so Cristiano left Madeira and came to live full-time in Lisbon. At first, the other academy kids taunted him for his island accent. “As soon as I opened my mouth,” he wrote in his memoir, Moments, “they immediately started laughing and mocking. I felt like a clown.”

Cristiano missed Madeira and his family so much that several times he came close to giving up. He cried constantly. At the age of 14, after he threw a chair at his teacher, he quit school and devoted himself full-time to soccer. He practiced relentlessly. His rise within the club was lightning fast. At the age of 17, he made his professional debut. When he scored his first goal for Sporting Lisbon, his mom was so excited she needed medical attention.

Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson soon took notice of the boy; Ronaldo was one of the most thrilling young players he’d ever seen. He signed him for the unheard-of sum (for such a young player) of £12 million. The boy still had braces on his teeth and a bad case of acne. Yet Ronaldo held such promise that Ferguson gave him the jersey with the 7, the number of Man U’s aristocracy, worn by the likes of George Best, Eric Cantona, and David Beckham. Wearing the number 7, said Ronaldo, was “an honor and a responsibility.”

On August 16, 2003, Ronaldo made his first appearance at Manchester’s Old Trafford stadium–the Theatre of Dreams. As Ferguson writes in his autobiography, the crowd reacted “as if a Messiah had materialized before their eyes. His talent was instantly apparent.”

Not that he was perfect–the boy wonder had a lot of bad habits. In particular, the manager disliked Ronaldo’s “screaming and amateur dramatics” and his tendency to hold on to the ball too long, performing flamboyant tricks that, while impressive, weren’t necessarily effective. Ronaldo was, wrote Ferguson, a “wee showoff…desperate to convince everyone how good he was.” But Ronaldo strove constantly to root out the bad and build on the good. “The practice ethic he created within himself became a constant.”

Just as he was beginning his rise at Man U, the young player met with family tragedy: His father died of liver disease. Ronaldo, only 20 years old, was devastated. The death remains a “wound that has still not healed,” he writes in Moments. Alcohol wrecked his father’s health, which is one of the reasons why today Ronaldo only drinks occasionally. “He is alive in my mind,” Ronaldo has written of his late father. “I feel his presence. I cannot explain it, but sometimes I feel that I hear his advice.”

In many ways, Ferguson filled the void. Number 7 thrived during his six years at Man U, maturing his game, scoring more and more goals, helping the club secure numerous titles, and winning (in 2008) his first Ballon d’Or award. Ferguson notes that Ronaldo’s greatest strength is mental, his desire to run with the ball against all opposition. “There are different forms of courage and that one is the best one,” Ferguson told The Guardian. “You’ve got lads who will run through a brick wall, lads who go into flying tackles, they will play with cut heads, but the courage to take the ball all the time is a fantastic courage.”

Like all ambitious sons, Ronaldo eventually had to move on from his father figure. In 2009, he accepted an offer from Real Madrid, which paid Manchester a transfer fee of $133 million–by far the greatest sum that had ever been paid for a soccer player. Ronaldo did not disappoint, scoring goals in what’s been called “industrial quantities.” In his first season with Real, he scored 33. The next year he tallied 51. The year after that, 55.

His time at Real Madrid reached an apotheosis this past spring, when the club won the Champions League Final in Lisbon, Portugal, against crosstown rival Atletico Madrid. Ronaldo scored a record 16 goals to power his team to the final, though his performance in it was unremarkable. He did score on a penalty kick late in the game, when Real was up 3-1. It was, in a way, a meaningless additional goal, but Ronaldo made headlines anyway by ripping off his shirt, flexing his muscles, and roaring Hulk Hogan–style in a high-testosterone celebration. It was a very Ronaldo moment, a display of ego and naked emotion that many characterized as distasteful.

Ronaldo had dared to fly high, and on that night he’d won the world’s greatest club trophy, on home turf. The clown was king.

People who follow La Liga say Ronaldo has noticeably matured as a person and an athlete since coming to Real Madrid. Most of the bad habits from his Manchester United days have all but vanished. “Ronaldo has become a truly seasoned athlete, a leader on the field,” Antonio Gaspar, Ronaldo’s longtime physiotherapist, tells me. “I’ve enjoyed watching how he’s evolved. He’s still strong and fast and quick, he still has the technical ability to dazzle, but he plays smarter and has the experience and maturity to take better advantage of his assets.” It’s that fleeting moment at the peak of an athlete’s trajectory when his physical maturity is in sync with his emotional development. “Ronaldo’s come to represent excellence as an achievement, not just as a gift,” says Graham Hunter, who covers La Liga for ESPN.

In fact, some argue that Ronaldo’s raging self-confidence and pursuit of perfection are what have helped him reach and stay at the top. “The day that he stops trying to be perfect will be the start of his decline,” says Hudson. “His arrogance is the fuel to the fire. It accelerates what’s driving him. Dealing with it on a day-to-day basis must be absolute hell. Pressure can kill players, wonderful players. But Cristiano wears it like a necklace of Cartier diamonds.”

Ronaldo’s time at Real has also been characterized by intense rivalry. In any other era, he would probably have been judged, hands down, as European soccer’s preeminent star. But the sport has seen the rise of another megastar during the same period. Argentina’s Lionel Messi, nicknamed the Flea, is a very different kind of player from Ronaldo, with a different physique, style, and personality. Yet the Barcelona forward has been a dominant force in club soccer, winning the Ballon d’Or award four times. Messi’s prominence and popularity have created continuing frustration for Ronaldo. For years, he’s tried to break the Messi spell.

Ronaldo has grown tired of comparisons to Messi. It’s possible, he admits, that the two athletes have served as mutual goads, helping inspire each other. But, he has said, “I don’t compete against Messi. I compete against myself.” And as he told me: “I like to focus on myself. I am more concerned with my own game than I am on rivals.”

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Ronaldo’s evolving maturity on the field has also been inspired by a factor off it: fatherhood. On July 3, 2010, Ronaldo’s Facebook and Twitter pages posted a curious announcement: “It is with great joy and emotion that I inform you I have recently become father to a baby boy.” For the millions in the Ronaldosphere, this news was electric. But it raised a question: Who was the lucky mother? Irina Shayk, Ronaldo’s girlfriend, had not been pregnant.

Ronaldo asked for privacy, but the world declined. Rumors swirled in the tabloids. Was it a surrogate? A one-night stand? Whoever the mother was, he reportedly paid £10 million to silence her before taking full custody. It was as though Ronaldo had single-handedly spawned a Mini-Me and perhaps even planned it. In 2007, Ronaldo wrote in his book that he would “like to have a child some time before getting married.” He went on, “If it is a boy, then he should have the same ‘football’ genes as me. I will not say I would like to have a clone, but hope that our similarities would be easy to notice, at all levels.”

Cristiano Ronaldo Jr. is now an adorable 4-year-old. I sat next to him, perched high in Ronaldo’s private box, for a La Liga game at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu Stadium. The boy romped around the glassed-in chamber, stylishly dressed in designer kiddie clothes, as a waitress served drinks and Iberian ham and the match unfolded in the green depths below. Ronaldo’s mother, Dolores, was in charge of the boy that day. The kid looks a lot like his dad, with an impish grin and a knack for flashing the thumbs-up sign. Ronaldo is utterly devoted to him. “Fatherhood is amazing,” he later tells me. “My son gives me a lot of joy. It’s almost like a dream every day.”

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One cold day in January of this year, in Zurich, Switzerland, Pelé stood at the podium of the FIFA Ballon d’Or presentation, a glitzy event stage-managed to resemble a show-business awards show. The Brazilian patriarch was there to announce the winner of football’s most prestigious honor. The prize is given out to the player who outshone all others the previous calendar year.

As Pele held the envelope, the cameras cut between the three nominees–France’s Franck Ribery, Argentina’s Lionel Messi, and of course, Ronaldo. He was dressed in a sheeny black tux and bow tie. Shayk sat at his side, her glossed lips pursed in anticipation. Pele opened the envelope: “The name is…Cristiano Ronaldo.” Ronaldo kissed Shayk and strode toward the stage to give Pele a hug. Then Cristiano Jr., impeccably dressed in a cardigan sweater fashioned to look like a tux, walked up on stage.

“Thank you to everyone,” Ronaldo said, fighting back tears. There was not a trace of arrogance in his eyes–he was humble, and his voice broke with raw emotion. He thanked his family as his mother beamed back with pride, dabbing her face with a handkerchief. Ronaldo held up the trophy for all to see–a golden soccer ball, destined for his museum in Funchal. “People who know me know how many people helped me,” he said. “If I have forgotten anyone, I do apologize because I am deeply moved.”

Finally, for this year at least, the Messi spell had been broken. Ronaldo drank in the adulation, but then his teary face hardened into a mask of determination. You could sense he was already moving beyond this celebratory moment, could see the fire and worry in his eyes.

Late this summer, the 2014 La Liga season kicks off, and Ronaldo, the Anxious One, will be starting all over again, resuming his quest for perfection.

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What Drives Cristiano Ronaldo?