“From the day he walked through the door at the Carrington training ground to the day he left, Cristiano Ronaldo was the greatest trainer I ever worked with.”
That was the view of Mike Clegg, who was the power development coach at Manchester United from 2000 until 2011.
“He took on a new level of total dedication to his training because he wanted to be the best footballer in the world. He filled his time with football, his whole life was dedicated to it.
“He even had his own cook so that he was eating well all the time, he made sure he bought a house with a swimming pool so that he could do more training.”
Clegg, whose son Michael also played for United, held the bags for Roy Keane to punch and watched Ryan Giggs continually open his mind to new ideas to extend his longevity on a football field. But he never saw a player train like Ronaldo during his time at United, which ended in 2009 when he moved to Real Madrid.
“Some players overdo it,” he says. “I’ve seen players train themselves into the ground because of insufficient knowledge, but Ronaldo was more intelligent than that.
“He’d train hard, but he’d listen to the specialists around him, the coaches, the manager, the other players, like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. He took their advice in pursuit of personal excellence.”
Clegg said Ronaldo would arrive early so he could prepare properly. “He’d be in the gym with me doing core work, then he’d do activation, then his actual football training.”
Training done, that was the point at which most footballers would shower, get changed and pack up for the day. Not Ronaldo.
“Cristiano would come back into the gym and do some power work for his legs,” Clegg says. “Then he would go home, eat the right food, swim, sleep, where I’m sure he dreamed about football, and come back in the next morning.”
After five or six years of that, Clegg said the Portuguese became the player who was sold for £80 million (Dh398m).
On Tuesday, in Solna, Sweden, Ronaldo again showed why only Lionel Messi can rival his talents in world football.
Even his opponent, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a player as close to those two as any, had to applaud as Ronaldo dominated the second half of Portugal's World Cup qualifying play-off against Portugal with his fifth hat-trick of the season to lead his country to next summer's World Cup finals in Brazil.
The man we see is the product of hard work, dedication and talent.
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