Instead, there’s something deeper at play. Klosterman characterizes our view of the 1990s as a “good time that happened a long time ago, though it didn’t seem so long ago”. Its many cultural touches – “The Simpsons”, “Friends”, German pop sensation Haddaway – still too familiar to feel almost (but not quite) the present, while much of its reality seems impossibly distant. People didn’t have the Internet in the 1990s. They bought CDs.
The same effect applies to football. Ronaldo and his colleagues are present in the way that Maradona, say, no; they appear in video games and have their own special launch deals and struggle to escape the paparazzi.
But we have almost no exposure to those stars because we are their successors. The 1990s, Klosterman wrote, “was a decade where one could watch absolutely everything, and then never watch it again.”
Watching Ronaldo play even on television is a relatively rare thing, certainly before the dying days of his career. Each of his appearances is not broadcast around the world. His iconic goals don’t happen in a loop, continuously, since they hit the net. There was a blur, a mystery, to him – and at the age he was playing – that subsequent generations did not. Still there, unanswered questions.
They are also important people, because it was through the 1990s of football that we saw the roots of the game as we experience it today. It wasn’t just an era when football became fully associated with celebrities for the first time, when the last vestiges of isolationism and national identity were erased, when transfer fees and wages exceeded out of control, when what used to be sport becomes entertainment.
In the sports scene, that’s also where the ideas that shape the future of gaming come into play. Some of them are administrative – change in backpass ruleFor example, it has to happen because pressing comes into play – and some of that is philosophical, as Johan Cruyff’s thinking conveys to Pep Guardiola, among others.
But at least part of it was shown by Ronaldo. As his former teammate Christian Vieri puts it in “The Phenomenon,” football “has never seen a player like Ronaldo when he first emerged: a player of the finest technicality, sophistication. most, but also a possessor of incredible speed, a furious shot, and a ferocious, rippling power. Ronaldo is a striker of all alone.
