𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

As part of our buildup to the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, we are publishing excerpted chapters from The Soccer 100, The Athletic’s definitive book on the 100 greatest players of all time, courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

The 10 players we will feature are the highest-ranked World Cup winners of our 100. Today, we look at one year in the glittering career of one of Brazil’s greatest strikers: Ronaldo’s single season with Barcelona.

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When you picture Ronaldo, it probably isn’t in a Barcelona shirt.

He exists in the broader public consciousness in the white of Real Madrid, or the yellow of Brazil, or even the black and blue of Inter. You think of him scoring twice in the 2002 World Cup final or that hat-trick for Madrid against Manchester United in the following year’s Champions League. Or perhaps even some of his darker moments; his face contorted in agony after his second knee injury at Inter, or looking spaced-out before the 1998 World Cup final.

But his one season at Barcelona, 1996–97, was his peak.

Arguably, it was the peak of centre-forwards, full stop. It was where he recorded his biggest single-season goal tally. It was where he announced himself as a true world great. It was where he did things that made people who had seen it all in football admit they had never seen anything quite like him.

The January 1997 edition of World Soccer magazine had Ronaldo on its cover under the headline “Best Ever?” It was a big question to ask about a 20-year-old halfway through his first season in one of Europe’s top leagues, but they weren’t wrong.

Most of the players in this book justified their inclusion through a whole career of excellence — or at least an extended spell. Ronaldo does, too, but even if we were to forget the other 17 seasons of his career — the club trophies, the World Cup, the Golden Boot, the many cabinets of individual awards, the 305 goals for Cruzeiro, PSV, Inter, Madrid, Milan and Corinthians — and just concentrated on that single year in Catalonia, he would still qualify as one of the greats.

At the start, Josep Lluís Núñez wasn’t sure. Barcelona’s club president had asked Bobby Robson, appointed as their manager in the summer of 1996, for his preference as a new striker. Robson suggested Alan Shearer, but was told in no uncertain terms by Blackburn Rovers that his fellow Englishman was not for sale… a few weeks before selling him to Newcastle United.

Robson’s other option was Ronaldo.

Just about to turn 20 at the time, the Brazilian had scored a bagful of goals in two seasons at PSV, although a knee injury — which would turn out to be a ticking time bomb — had curtailed his second year in the Netherlands.

Robson thought he could be signed for $10million, but Núñez went back to PSV over and over, incrementally increasing his bids and, after each rejected offer, returned to Robson to ask if he was certain about this kid. “At one point, Núñez wagged his finger at me and warned, ‘Bobby, you know your job depends on this?’,” Robson wrote in his autobiography.

Eventually, the deal was done for $20million, an extraordinary sum at the time, the world transfer record (albeit one broken shortly afterwards by Shearer’s move to Newcastle), and a particular gamble given Ronaldo’s youth and relative lack of pedigree. But Robson was sure.

Ronaldo’s first goal came five minutes into his debut, in the Spanish Super Cup against Atlético Madrid. The first league goal was scored against Racing Santander three weeks later. Then he got two in the next game against Real Sociedad. Then another two against Real Zaragoza.

By that point, his new team-mates were convinced, too.

“I’d seen him on television at PSV and thought: ‘Wow’,” then Barca midfielder Luis Enrique told FourFourTwo magazine in 2017. “Then he came to Barcelona. He’s the most spectacular player I’ve ever seen. He did things I’d never seen before. We’re now used to seeing (Lionel) Messi dribble past six players, but not then.”

The seventh league game of the season came at Compostela, a small, relatively unremarkable side who have only spent four seasons in the Spanish top flight in their history. They haven’t had many former players or managers of particular note. They’ve never won a major trophy. At the risk of being insulting or patronising, what happened on October 12, 1996, might be the most notable event in the club’s history.

This was the goal. The Goal. The most remarkable goal you will perhaps ever see.

It starts before Ronaldo even touches the ball, his mere presence making two Compostela defenders crash into each other near the halfway line, like slapstick cartoon henchmen. Midfielder Saïd Chiba gives up on trying to tackle him and grabs a big handful of his jersey, but it’s of absolutely no use. Ronaldo breaks away and the only shame is that Chiba isn’t just left standing there with a ripped piece of shirt in his hand as his opponent speeds off into the distance.

Ronaldo then accelerates past two defenders and into the area, at which point the angle to the goal appears to have narrowed a little too much. So he cuts inside and his feet become a blur, whipping the ball back and forth at a speed that is difficult to pick up with the naked eye.

Briefly, Ronaldo seems to lose control of the ball. But no matter, he reacts to it before anyone else can. He sweeps a finish into the corner. Everyone in the stadium recognises that they’ve seen something unforgettable.

On the touchline, Robson leaps to his feet, throws his hands in the air, and then clasps them to his head like a pilgrim overcome with religious fervour upon seeing a holy icon or relic. “You won’t find a player who can score goals like that,” he told the media after the game. “Can anybody, anywhere, show me a better player?”

No, they could not.

Ronaldo finished that season with 47 goals in 49 games. He scored the only goal, a penalty amid another mesmerising performance, in the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup final against Paris Saint-Germain. Barcelona missed the league title by two points, broadly due to a 2-1 loss to Hércules in the closing weeks, a game Ronaldo missed while on international duty. Later in 1997, he became the youngest player to win the Ballon d’Or.

In 2017, Óscar García, who was in that Barcelona squad and later became a coach at the club, was asked by the journalist Graham Hunter for a Bleacher Report piece to compare a couple of the greats that he encountered in his time at the Camp Nou.

“I’ve worked around Barcelona while Leo Messi’s been there and at his best. I’ve never seen anything like Ronaldo,” he said.

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Here’s the weird thing about Ronaldo’s season at Barcelona: By the latter stages of it, he wasn’t really that popular with the supporters.

He annoyed some of them by swapping shirts with countryman Roberto Carlos after a Clásico in which he had scored the opener in a 3-2 Barca win. He missed crucial games toward the end of the campaign while playing for Brazil. His agents became minor public enemies as talk of him wanting to leave grew. He agreed to a nine-year contract with Barcelona before he and/or his representatives reneged on it and ultimately engineered a move to Inter.

But one of the main reasons he was not as popular as you would think in Barcelona was his habit of taking frequent trips back to his homeland.

The perception was that these were jollies — unprofessional transatlantic jaunts that were distracting him from the job at hand. While he did frequently visit his girlfriend Susana Werner, and pictures of him fully and enthusiastically enjoying the Rio Carnival hardly helped, these trips did serve another purpose. Ronaldo was visiting a specialist named Nilton Petrone about his increasingly troublesome knee.

The warning lights had been flashing about that knee since his PSV days. The big problem was that it was not just one problem. He had been diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease, a condition that causes inflammation in the knee and is common in young people who are still growing. He also had a condition called trochlear dysplasia, a problem that, as Dr Petrone explained in an interview with FourFourTwo magazine in 2018, causes the kneecap to “dance on the femur”.

Furthermore, they were both problems that were exacerbated by twisting and turning at speed and neither could, at the time at least, be corrected with surgery. They just had to be monitored closely in the hope that nothing too serious went wrong.

His first knee injury at Inter, while playing against Lecce in November 1999, was serious but looked like a relatively routine ligament tear. He was able to walk — well, limp — off the pitch on that occasion, and it took a scan to reveal what was actually wrong.

The second was much more, for want of a more elegant description, spectacular. He was six minutes into his return, against Lazio in April 2000, when his foot stopped in the turf and the rest of his body continued to move forward, prompting him to scream in pain. “He ripped the kneecap tendon completely,” Petrone told FourFourTwo. “His kneecap actually exploded and it ended up in the middle of his thigh.”

After that, Ronaldo was never quite the same again. The explosiveness was dulled. The pace a few clicks down. But it tells you how good he was that he could lose all of that and still be among the greatest players in the world.

He was just a genius now, rather than an alien.

Ronaldo is unquestionably one of the greats, a footballer of extraordinary physical and technical gifts, perhaps the one who combined those two elements to the most devastating effect of them all.

But he does raise an interesting debate about what qualifies a player for a place among the pantheon. Is ability enough, or does one require longevity? And if the answer to that is yes, then for how long? What is the minimum length of time that a genius has to be at their peak to qualify?

Ronaldo arguably only stayed at the summit for two and a half years — the season at Barcelona and his first 18 months in Italy, the time between him joining an elite club and his first serious knee injury. From that point, he wasn’t the same, so it’s not particularly controversial to say that his best years were gone by the time he was only just 23.

But if we are to accept that his feats before that injury were enough to qualify him as one of the greatest, then we have to consider whether we would think the same if he had not played another game after it. Had his career stopped in 1999, would he be in this book? If he had not played for Madrid or helped win Brazil the World Cup in 2002? If he had not been around for a few years afterwards, being merely one of the best strikers in the world rather than a glorious freak of nature?

Probably not.

Those latter years gave us two things. First are the tangible achievements, most notably those goals in that World Cup co-hosted by Japan and South Korea. Ronaldo was the tournament’s top scorer with eight, finding the net in every game apart from the quarter-final against England. He scored the only goal in the semi-final against Turkey and the only two in the final against Germany. It wasn’t quite “Diego Maradona in 1986” levels of a player winning the World Cup on his own, but it was not far off.

Second is the physical reminder of his greatness. Had he disappeared completely after that 1999 injury, then we would not have been able to watch a version of what he could have become. Even though he wasn’t at his absolute peak in those years, he was close enough to keep him in our collective consciousness, to make us think, ‘If this guy is this good after his knee collapsed, then imagine what he could have been like’.

“Ronaldo copied the classic journey of the mythological local hero who descends into Hell then comes back to change history,” wrote Luis Fernando Verissimo in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo.

The thing that is always said about Ronaldo, the unanswerable hypothetical, is: what could he have been were it not for the injuries?

But do we need to wonder? Do we need another six or seven years to appreciate how special he was?

It would have been wonderful, but the time he was that good, particularly in the Barcelona season — the things he showed us then that we had not seen before and really haven’t seen since — are surely enough.

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Excerpted from The Soccer 100 by Oliver Kay & James Horncastle with The Athletic Soccer Staff, published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2025 by The Athletic Media Company. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.