A version of this blog appeared in Guardian Sport
It’s June 8th 1997 in Lyon and Italy and Brazil, World Cup finalists three years earlier, were about to square off in Le Tournoi for their first meeting since that sweltering day in Pasadena. Italian coach Cesare Maldini walks over to Fabio Cannavaro and says: “Fabio, we’ll see if this Ronaldo truly is a phenomenon.” By the end of a pulsating 3-3 draw in which Ronaldo had scored and tormented both Cannavaro and Paolo Maldini, producing one of the most iconic images of the 1990s, Cannavaro returned to Maldini Snr and told him that he was indeed the real deal, to which Maldini said: “Yes Fabio, you’re right.”
Six weeks later, Ronaldo joined Internazionale.
According to former Inter president Massimo Moratti, the idea of signing Ronaldo occurred after a drab 0-0 away draw against Fiorentina three months earlier. Moratti supposedly concocted the plan to sign the world’s greatest player in the back of a Florentine taxi. And true to his word, Moratti delivered, exploiting rising tensions between Ronaldo and Barcelona to activate the Brazilian’s buyout clause. The euphoria Ronaldo’s arrival generated that summer hadn’t been seen since Diego Maradona joined Napoli 13 years earlier.
The revisionist narrative surrounding Ronaldo’s career is that the year in Barcelona was the pinnacle of his career. Speaking strictly on a stats basis, this is true. He rifled in 47 goals in 49 games in all competitions and the wonder goal against Compostela in October 1996, where he swats away opposition players with such outrageous ease, reinforces that narrative.
Yet it was the first season at Inter that was truly the peak of Ronaldo 1.0, where this perfectly assembled force of nature destroyed everything in his path. Rampaging through La Liga was one thing, but doing it in Serie A, by far and away the greatest league in the world (and with 1997-98 arguably being the strongest singular season the sport has ever seen), was quite another.
Serie A at this point had been home to the world’s best players and the most-feared strikers for years. Italy’s grizzled, battle-hardened defenders were well used to locking horns against the greatest foreigners to ever kick a ball on a weekly basis, but they weren’t quite ready for Ronaldo. If Maradona possessed dribbling genius, Zinedine Zidane the ethereal touch and the likes of Marco Van Basten, Gabriel Batistuta and George Weah raw physicality and pace sprinkled with a dash of elegance, Ronaldo was an intoxicating cocktail of them all. A Playstation footballer come to life.
Ronaldo’s highly anticipated debut was upended by a then-unknown Alvaro Recoba, who scored two howitzers in the space of five minutes to overcome Brescia. The second game of the season saw Inter travel to face Roberto Baggio’s Bologna in a game billed unimaginatively as ‘Ronaldo vs. Baggio’, a battle between the game’s two premiere players for a large stretch of the decade. A rain-drenched Stadio Dall’Ara saw an instant classic, with Baggio scoring twice and Inter scoring four. Inter’s third saw Ronaldo get off the mark, twisting Bologna defender Massimo Paganin like a pretzel on the edge of the box with a right foot shimmy before planting the ball into the bottom corner with his left.
“Ronaldo? Mamma mia! What a player,” reflected Baggio, who would join Inter the following summer to team up with Ronaldo in the greatest partnership that never was. “He came from the future. He played football with technique and speed ahead of his time. I saw him do things that were unthinkable, which no one had done or thought of until then. He was unique.”
Ronaldo scored six in his next seven games, including a mesmeric performance against Parma in October that saw him dance, pivot and glide past players at will. Just to prove he could do what he liked, he crashed a free kick past Gianluigi Buffon from 25 yards out that clipped the underside of the crossbar. By Christmas, Ronaldo had nine in 13.
“He was an alien among humans,” said Buffon when asked of Ronaldo.“ It seemed like he was created in a lab. He was the perfect player, as he had power, speed, intuition technical skills and quickness.” And that was the beauty of the first Ronaldo, he could literally do everything: he took penalties, free kicks and even corners in the first Inter season, he would pick up the ball near the halfway line and proceed to dribble past as many players dared stand in his way.
Ronaldo and Inter suffered a bit of a dip following the 1-0 win against Juventus in early 1998, dropping 10 points in January and February. His one and only league hat-trick came in the 5-0 demolition of Lecce in the middle of this sticky patch. His first represented the destructive brilliance of early Ronaldo.
Yet if you wanted to get a snapshot of just how unfathomably good Ronaldo was during that two-year golden period, the game against Spartak Moscow in the UEFA Cup semi final second leg in Moscow is the perfect distillation of a player operating in a different orbit. Describing the pitch at the old Dynamo Stadium as a potato field would be an affront to potato fields the world over. Laced with ice and snow due to typical April weather in the Russian capital, the game was inexplicably allowed to go ahead, but it made little difference to Ronaldo.
He scored twice, and if his first was an opportunistic tap-in, his second was anything but. Like the goals against Sampdoria, Lecce and Schalke, Ronaldo collected the ball from deep, spun on a dime, ran deep into the heart of the Spartak defence, passed to Ivan Zamarano, who squeezed the ball back to Ronaldo. Ronaldo then danced through two defenders with a single touch, rounded the goalkeeper and slotted the ball home, all done at high speed whilst effectively playing on an ice rink. “Straordinario!” Shouted legendary Rai commentator Bruno Pizzul. Oh indeed.
The season had been building to the titanic clash between Inter and Juventus at the end of April. The most important Derby d’Italia in decades, with only a point separating them, was essentially stripped down to a battle between Ronaldo and Alessandro Del Piero, the two best players in the world. Both had been upstaging one another all season, forcing the other to raise the stakes even higher. “When you arrived at Inter you were already in my head, and you inspired me to become better,” revealed Del Piero to Ronaldo in 2020. Ronaldo had scored 22 goals in 28 Serie A games and had dominated the UEFA Cup; Del Piero had 20 in 30 games and had dominated the Champions League. Whoever won the game would win the title.
The game and what happened now lives in infamy and won’t be dissected here, but the truth is Ronaldo had missed several chances prior to the Mark Iuliano incident. For a man who was remarkably zen in front of goalkeepers, the story of the game was of missed chances rather than penalties not given.
The 1-0 defeat knocked the wind out of Inter’s sails, and with the league mathematically gone following a surprise defeat to Bari in early May, the focus now became the UEFA Cup and the final against Lazio in Paris.
“I have watched that game on video so many times since then, trying to work out what I did wrong,” remarked Alessandro Nesta. “We lost 3-0, but I don’t think now it was my fault. Ronaldo was simply unstoppable. He is so quick he makes everyone else look as if they are standing still.”
Nesta, one of the most elegant defenders Italy ever produced and one who could shackle Lionel Messi at the age of 36, could do little to stop Ronaldo at 22. The Brazilian produced the most complete performance of his career, toying with Lazio for 90 minutes. Javier Zanetti and Zamorano had already scored before Ronaldo sprung Lazio’s offside trap in the 69th minute to utterly bamboozle the hapless Luca Marchegiani, putting the goalkeeper on the floor without so much as touching the ball before stroking it into the empty net. “It was incredible, but he did tricks like that in every training session,” recalled Youri Djorkaeff. “We were used to it. Ronaldo was phenomenal. He proved that he was a cut above the rest that season.” It became one of the defining goals of the 1990s, confirmation, if not already needed, that Ronaldo was a 21st century footballer playing in the dying embers of the 20th.
Ronaldo would end the 1997/98 season with 34 goals in all competitions, 25 in Serie A, and had torn the most unrelenting league the game has seen to shreds. “My toughest opponents would be Maradona, Ronaldo, who was phenomenal in his two years at Inter, and Zidane,” retorted Maldini when asked by La Gazzetta dello Sport to name the players who gave him the hardest time over 24 years at the highest level. “Ronaldo was the only player who really stirred fear in me. Just walking on the same pitch as he did was terrifying for me,” wrote Cannavaro on The Players’ Tribune in 2018.
He didn’t bring the Scudetto back to the black-and-blue half of Milan, but going into France ’98 there was no doubting Ronaldo was the finest footballer on planet earth. Everything seemed to be there for his taking, and most assumed that he would only ascend to even bigger heights. Yet as history played out, just two months after his UEFA Cup zenith in Paris, the same city bore witness to the beginning of the end of Ronaldo 1.0, and he was never the same. The human knee simply wasn’t built for that level of contorting, pulling and pushing, not on a frame as muscular as Ronaldo’s and at such devastating, beguiling speed.
But if you were old and fortunate enough to witness it, 1997-98 Ronaldo was special. The ultimate cheat code player. After a year in Serie A, few disagreed with Cannavaro’s original assessment: Ronaldo was indeed Il Fenomeno. And the league hasn’t quite seen anything as remarkable since.