Famously, the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il only ever played one game of golf. In 1994 state media reported Kim had picked up a club for the first time at the country’s only golf course. Happily he took to the sport instantly, completing his debut round in a world-record 38 under par with 11 holes in one. At which point he announced he was retiring from golf and would never play again.
It is of course a terrible blow for golf to lose such a talent, and tantalizing to imagine just how good the Supreme Commander of the People’s Army could have become. Worse, there is no recording of the round, just the sworn testimony of his 17 bodyguards that it definitely, like, happened. Plus of course Kim had a wide brief of other interests to cram in, among these composing six full opera scores, all of which are, according to state records, “better than any other in history”.
Perhaps it’s just me, but as time has passed there has been something of the dictator-propaganda machine about the endless slew of Ronaldo-Messi facts and stats and milestones. You know the kind of thing. Six hundred goals. Fifty hat-tricks. Threw an apple over a petrol station. Only man to score simultaneously on a single day against every single team in the league.
Gorging on this, cramming in great dripping handfuls of left-footed assists in a calendar year, or the fact that more people follow Cristiano Ronaldo on Instagram than have ever died in the whole of human history, you can grow a little dizzy. Why not a thousand goals? Why not a million goals? Worse, the thought occurs that these Ronaldo-Messi numbers are not robust, that they’re products of a moment in football history when money, talent-hoarding and changes in the rules have made it possible to dominate completely, ushering in this stream of super-numbers, all of them better than all the other numbers from times when such numbers were impossible.
Except, of course, this isn’t quite right. Every now and then a stat crops up that really does take the breath away, a reminder that there is a cold hard edge of genius at work here. This week brought one of those. Last week, Ronaldo scored four goals for Portugal in Vilnius to break Robbie Keane’s Euro qualifier goals record. More exciting still, Ronaldo is now on 93 international goals, 16 behind Ali Daei’s all-time international mark for Iran.
Watching him against Lithuania he still looks like the same old Ronaldo, the same old snake-hipped robot-replicant physique, the sense of a man-sized wedding cake figurine miraculously come to life. The actual goals were pretty ragged: a penalty; a triple-layered fluke (slip, bobble, deflection); a tap-in from a lovely pass by Bernardo Silva; and a classy late sidefoot.
Clearly Portugal will waltz through qualifying. Next up are Luxembourg twice, Ukraine and Lithuania at home. At this rate Ronaldo could end up passing the 100 goal mark before the end of the year, and then hauling in the all-time record at next year’s Euros. It is a startling prospect, if only because it is such a funny record for Ronaldo to break, a brilliantly literal-minded notion of greatness. “I’m going to score more goals than anyone else ever! This will mean that I’m the best!” And oddly enough, perhaps it might, if only because this is such an unusual, out-there feat in modern football.
Just look at the top 10: Ali Daei, Kunishige Kamamoto, Godfrey Chitalu, Hussein Saeed, Bashar Abdullah, Sunil Chhetri. Add in Pelé, Ferenc Puskas, Sandor Kocsis. And now you know who. This not the kind of list anyone ever really talks about topping. No serious modern elite-level footballer actually scores 100 international goals. Daei’s record is an outlier, a much-loved folksy detail,: like Mull of Kintyre being No. 1 for six months or the world’s tallest man always being mild-mannered Robert Wadlow in his waistcoat and sad specs. You don’t “chase down” or crowingly overhaul dear old Ali Daei.
Except, of course, it turns out you do. At least if you have the capacity to reduce and refine your powers to the status of a kind of mobile goal-hammer, and in the process carry your team with you. Ronaldo scored his first Portugal goal for a nation that had never reached a major final. Fifteen years later, the Ronaldo span, they’ve been in three and won two of them. Fifty-five of those 93 goals have come in tournament qualification. Nineteen have come in finals. As astonishing 56 have come in his past 60 caps.
Yes: stat-blah, numberwang, glazed eyes. But no one else is doing this. And if he does get to 110 we may just have to accept that yes, goals are an incredibly simple metric; but then yes, they’re also the metric that matters most. Part of Ronaldo’s strange brilliance has been to turn himself into a high-end product, human Coca-Cola, a substance that never changes, never ages, never exists as anything but pure, uncut, unvarying Ronaldo. More goals, more insistent, relentless influence. What more is he supposed to do?
It won’t become clear how violently Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have distorted modern football until they are finally gone; until it becomes clear this wasn’t just an evolutionary shift where genius-level attacking players would from now on dominate the sky. In fact they are simply stand-alone superstars, a brilliant fluke of all-time talent in the same time and space.
Football has slightly choked on this in recent years. The absurdity of Neymar, the pointless urge to style a brilliant team player such as Raheem Sterling as the next GOAT-style individualist: these are the aftershocks of the star culture we have naturally ingested as a side product. That era is entering its dog days. The passing of Daei’s goal record would be another significant endnote, perhaps even a suitable full-stop.
The Guardian Sport
