Ronaldo - 50 | OneFootball

There’s no point talking about it, you know, you’d never understand. Max Pezzali had captured the essence perfectly in one of his songs a few years earlier. Impossible, unthinkable, immeasurable to explain who and what Ronaldo was to the history of Inter and football.

His first match at San Siro, a friendly against Manchester United, saw him surrounded by dozens of children, symbolising the embrace of the entire Nerazzurri world. He was absent from the scoresheet in his first match, leaving the stage to Recoba, before scoring in Bologna in his second and never stopping from there.

In a pre-VAR era, when a defender could quite easily brutalise him, Ronaldo made fools of everyone, from Costacurta to Nesta, who, with the score at 3-0 during a European final, went over to ask him if he could, please, stop making him look ridiculous.

Who knows what the algorithm would make of him now: a forward who was practically useless in the air, ineffective from set pieces and offered little defensively. It was a different era of football, some might say. No, it was another planet. There were even reports of Milan fans occasionally going to watch Inter simply to admire the Fenomeno. We’ve got him, the fans would sing, along with an unrepeatable chant that went something along the lines of: now you really need to start worrying.

In Milano, shaved heads were synonymous with skinhead culture, an underground subculture with countless different strands, most of them extremist. They simply became known as the Ronaldo haircut. Unstoppable, halted only by physical problems and two terrible injuries.

In a fair world, his return after a year and a half away from the pitch would have been crowned with a trophy in 2002. The football gods, or perhaps the people in charge, decided otherwise. Either way, he gave us some unforgettable moments: his comeback goal in Brescia, his brace against Verona, that tear-jerking brace against Brescia, and his farewell with a free-kick goal against Piacenza. 59 goals in 99 appearances, but the numbers barely tell the story. The dribbles, the stepovers, bewildered opposition defenders, the feeling of watching the best player in the world wearing your shirt. At Cruzeiro, he was the enfant prodige; at PSV, a young phenomenon; Barcelona was over too quickly; at Real Madrid, he was one of many; at Milan, we could hardly believe our eyes, it seemed like a joke; at Corinthians, it was already over. Ronaldo’s team is, and will always be, Inter.