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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Ronaldo "Personal Life"

Ronaldo
Personal information

Full name : Ronaldo Luis Nazário de Lima
Date of birth : September 18, 1976 (age 31)
Place of birth : Bento Ribeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Height : 1.83 m (6 ft 0 in)
Playing position: Striker

Club information
Current club AC Milan
Number 99
Youth clubs
Social Ramos Club 1990-91
São Cristóvão 1991-93

Senior clubs
Years Club App (Gls)
1993-1994 Cruzeiro 013 (12)
1994-1996 PSV 046 (42)
1996-1997 FC Barcelona 037 (34)
1997-2002 Inter Milan 069 (49)
2002-2007 Real Madrid 127 (83)
2007- A.C. Milan 016 0(9)

National team
1994- Brazil 097 (62)
Ronaldo Luis Nazário de Lima (born September 18, 1976), is a Brazilian professional footballer who plays as a striker for the Italian Serie A club AC Milan. He has been nicknamed "The Phenomenon" (Portuguese: O Fenômeno, Spanish: El Fenómeno). Pelé named him one of the 125 greatest living footballers in March 2004. In 2007 France Football named him in their best starting 11 of all time.
Ronaldo has enjoyed success at the international level, winning the 1994 and 2002 FIFA World Cups with Brazil. Ronaldo has won three FIFA World Player of the Year awards (1996, 1997, 2002). He and former Real Madrid teammate Zinedine Zidane are the only two men to have won the award three times.

Personal life
Ronaldo was born in Bento Ribeiro, a poor neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Like many of his friends, he began to play football in the streets of his neighborhood. Ronaldo's actual date of birth is September 18, 1976, however, his father did not register his birth certificate until September 22, 1976 so some discrepancy has existed as to his actual birth date.
In April 1999, Ronaldo married Milene Domingues. The marriage lasted four years and ended in
divorce. The couple had a son, Ronald (born 2000). In 2005, Ronaldo got engaged to Brazilian model and MTV VJ Daniela Cicarelli, who became pregnant but suffered a miscarriage; their relationship lasted 3 months after their engagement. He ended his relationship with Brazilian supermodel Raica Oliveira in December 2006. Writer Andrew Downie asserted a correlation between Ronaldo's personal life and performance on the pitch, noting that his most prolific periods of goalscoring have coincided with the times when he was happily married.
In 2005, Ronaldo became co-owner of A1 Team Brazil, alongside Brazilian motorsports legend Emerson Fittipaldi. The team participates in the A1 Grand Prix series, with Nelson Piquet, Jr., Tony Kanaan and João Paulo Oliveira as drivers for the debut season.

Football career

Ronaldo's football abilities were first recognised when he was 14. He was recommended to the Brazil youth team by World Cup winner Jairzinho, who also arranged for his own former club, Cruzeiro Esporte Clube, to sign him when he was old enough for a professional contract.Ronaldo scored 12 goals in 13 games in the Brazilian National Championship, and in the Minas Gerais State Championship he scored all three goals in Cruzeiro's 3-1 victory against arch-rival Atlético Mineiro. After being scouted by Piet de Visser, he was soon transferred for US$6 million to PSV Eindhoven, where he scored 42 goals in 46 league games and reached a total of 55 goals in 57 official appearances. Later he attracted the attention of Spain's FC Barcelona. He played forBarça in the 1996-97 season, scoring 47 in 49 (including appearances in the Copa del Rey and European Cup Winners Cup) on the way to leading the Catalan side to UEFA Cup Winners' Cup triumph (where he capped the season with the winning goal in the cup final itself). Inter Milan swooped to sign him the following year, and Ronaldo duly helped them repeat his former side's cup-winning run, this time in the UEFA Cup. As of 2006, Ronaldo is the last player to score more than 30 goals in 1 season in the Spanish La Liga.
On 21 November 1999, during a Serie A match against Lecce, Ronaldo felt his knee buckle and was forced to limp off the pitch. Medical exams after the match confirmed that the striker had ruptured a tendon in his right knee and would require surgery. During his first comeback on April 12, 2000, he played only seven minutes during the first leg of the coppa italia final against Lazio before injuring his knee for a second time.
After two operations and 20 months of rehabilitation, Ronaldo came back for the 2002 FIFA World Cup, helping Brazil win their fifth World Cup title. Later in 2002 he won the World Player of the Year award for the third time, and transferred from Inter to Real Madrid for approximately €39,000,000, after frequent disputes with Inter coach Héctor Cúper.His transfer
to Madrid was the subject of a media frenzy not just laced with the usual hype because of his reputation, but more so because he was now the third successive Galactico (or superstar) signed in as many years by the Spanish giants as part of their policy of signing the world's biggest superstar football players in order to maintain their levels of success whilst broadening their reaches of fame.
Ronaldo was such a well-known signing that sales of his shirt on the day of his signing alone broke all records the world over. Proof of his fame came with the fact that even though Ronaldo was sidelined through injury until October 2002, fans continued to chant his name in the stands. Ronaldo scored twice in his debut for Real Madrid. That same reception was observed on the night of the final game of the season against Athletic Bilbao, where Ronaldo scored again to seal his first season with 23 league goals (not including the goals in the UEFA Champions League that included a hat-trick away at Manchester United - in which Real Madrid still lost 4-3 away but proceeded 6-5 on aggregate.) and the La Liga Championship title for 2003, which Ronaldo had previously failed to win whilst at FC Barcelona.

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