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An Analysis of Cristiano Ronaldo's Blanket-Selling Side Hustle

What Cristiano Ronaldo has done, after finally proving himself the greatest soccer player in the world, is demonstrate that he is also a really embarrassing, sub-reality TV star moneymaker.

Something weird happened to Cristiano Ronaldo this summer, and that was that he won an international tournament. This de facto made him the best player in the world, the best player of all time. Messi, his closest rival for the crown, has now lost a World Cup final, lost a Copa America final, gone wild, and dyed his hair blonde, 1,2 and quit international soccer for good.

In the goliathic tussle between Messi and Ronaldo, a force of muscle versus a force of sublime balletic touch—a wordless fight between two men mainly fought in the comments sections of YouTube compilation videos—I personally have always erred more on the side of Messi, the perfect imp boy, over Ronaldo, the preening mega-athlete. But then Ronaldo won Euro 2016 with Portugal and, sorry, but silverware trumps skill. Ronaldo is now the GOAT. He had a winner's medal and a moth on his face to prove it. Messi is garbage and Ronaldo should be permanently handed the Ballon d'Or. I'm sorry. I don't make the rules, I just enforce them.

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So we just need to nip inside Ronaldo's head for a second: at 31, on the cusp of the edge of his powers, he has conquered his eternal rival, but also did it in the least Ronaldo way possible, struggling through two of the three group games, at times anonymous, at times towering, and then, as underdogs in the final, he went off injured after 25 minutes. Ronaldo won a tournament without personally dominating it. His team ground down France in the final in much the same way Greece did him bad in 2004. This is not how Ronaldo is used to winning: Ronaldo is sprinting from the halfway line to catch air time and power in an 86th minute header; Ronaldo is taking three deep breaths and hammering home a sublime free kick; Ronaldo is taking it past one, two, three men, pulling it back and taking it by another, lifting it over the goalkeeper so insolently the goalkeeper just takes his gloves off and throws them in the net, loses his cleats, walks out of the stadium in his bare socks, refuses to talk to the press. Ronaldo doesn't win from the bench with his knee bandaged up and his team playing a rigid, erosive game. Ronaldo doesn't rely on Eder, a failed Swansea striker, to win him a tournament. Ronaldo has to be Ronaldo.

I think the immediate mental aftermath of Portugal winning a tournament with Ronaldo, but also without Ronaldo, can be summed up in the following picture of Ronaldo:

I've joined a new team, Elite Team. Visit — Cristiano Ronaldo (@Cristiano)July 27, 2016

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Ronaldo has lost it now. Ronaldo winning a tournament without winning a tournament has sent him here. He is a blanket salesman now. And in a way, that is the ultimate flex: he has achieved so much in the game that he is choosing to abandon it, at his peak, both physical and in terms of legacy, to instead sell blankets with a Spanish Jesus fresco-level portrait of himself on it. Finally, Ronaldo has answered the ultimate question: what do you get the man who had everything? A large fleece blanket—"44 percent larger than a regular blanket!"—with his own name and likeness on it.

If you have watched Ronaldo, the film about Ronaldo, on a plane once like I have, then you will know a few things about Ronaldo: firstly, this is a man who would hire a film crew to spend two years basically making a piece of pro-Ronaldo propaganda and then literally call it Ronaldo; two, his best friend is a three-headed hydra made up of his agent, his not-good-at-soccer brother and his mysterious lab-bred son; and that he essentially lives alone in a palatial modern mansion near Madrid where he just drinks orange juice and stares at decorative ponds a lot, and sometimes makes his son read aloud. He's basically just Patrick Bateman run through Google Translate from English to Portuguese a few times and allowed to go wild in one of those weird continental fashion shops where all the T-shirts cost $895. So that's Ronaldo.

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This, also, is Ronaldo, blanket salesman:

This, right now, is Ronaldo's golden moment. This summer he is untouchable. By all means he should rule the world. But instead, this is how we will remember him: at his prime, in perfect physical condition, the deep tan of a four-week holiday spent backflipping off a yacht into the sea, in a dingily-lit hotel room, fully naked under a CR7 fleece blanket, saying, "Hi guys. I hope that—I hope that you like my blanket. Like I do. Very comfortable [double thumbs up, wink w/ clicking noise.]"

The greatest soccer player of all time wants you to buy a $132 blanket with his name on it.

The greatest soccer player of all time clearly took about six takes to try and sell a "very comfortable" blanket to you, and even then he fucked it, even then he fucked it up.

My theory is that the above work of art—"Cristiano Under Blanket", 2016, artist unknown—is actually the first true peek into the hall-of-mirrors psyche of Cristiano Ronaldo. First deduction: Ronaldo has some incredibly bad advisers. This is the man who just a month ago starred in the greatest soccer advertisement of all time, and now here he is, posing under a blanket on Twitter in the most unnatural-under-a-blanket pose I have ever seen (looking again at this photo, I don't think it is a stretch to say Cristiano Ronaldo has never used a blanket before, so alien he looks to the concept of blanket usage), filming himself in a hotel room on his iPhone, diverting his supporters to cr7blanket.com. This is because somebody told him to do this for money3. Enter into Cristiano Ronaldo's mind palace. Walk past the room where he just rubs olive oil into his six-pack for two hours a day. Walk through the lab where he bred a clone of himself with the express intention of playing for Real Madrid forever. Enter instead into his blanket fortress. Cristiano Ronaldo, the best soccer player ever, surrounded by fleece likenesses of himself, hammered from all sides by cozy proclamations of his name. Cristiano Ronaldo, the Mad King.

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Essentially, what Cristiano Ronaldo has done with this blanket is broken the artifice. We want our athletes to be incredible, untouchable, superhuman: too cool to care about blankets, or you, or me; too rich to need another business arm to prop up their existing wages. But what Cristiano Ronaldo has done, seconds after finally ascending as the greatest soccer player in the world, is prove that he is also a really embarrassing, like, sub-reality TV star moneymaker. Cristiano Ronaldo under a blanket is the level of some guy who went out first on Big Brother this year selling teeth whitening stuff on Instagram. Cristiano Ronaldo under a blanket is his "selling teatox on QVC." Cristiano Ronaldo is being authentic with his peers. Cristiano Ronaldo is copying and pasting the email from the PR, "Hi Cristiano!" and all, into a scheduled social media post. The world's best soccer player is also the world's most embarrassing one. What a year for the sport this has been.


1. This is called "going full Bowers", after Dane Bowers. I want to make this happen. It is a crime that the man who bought us the masterwork that is "Bomb Diggy" isn't linguistically marked in some way by our wider language.

2. It's also very "guy who married his childhood sweetheart and got divorced on his 29th birthday, loses perspective a bit and terrorizes the local Yates's", isn't it

3. For further evidence of Cristiano Ronaldo's Bad Career Decisions, see here

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.