‘I scored goals with Cristiano Ronaldo at 15. Even then his mindset and will to win was extraordinary’

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Paulo Sergio played with Cristiano Ronaldo in Sporting’s academy between 1999 and 2003.

I was 13 when I joined Sporting from Oriental, a smaller club in Lisbon. Cristiano had been there a couple of years at that point after moving over from Madeira. I didn’t know him when I arrived. I was in the year above him and he had not yet begun to play above his age group.

Honestly, he did not make a massive impression on me immediately. I could see that he had decent ability but he wasn’t one of the standout players at the academy. I was part of a great generation at Sporting, with loads of boys competing for attention. The attack was especially strong: Edgar Marcelino, Fabio Ferreira and myself all went to on play for Portugal at youth level.

Cristiano moved up to our under-15 team in 1998. That was when he started to show what he could do. He was one of the younger guys but everyone could see that there was something there. And over the course of that season, he improved so much. It was completely out of the ordinary.

Technically, he was really good. ‘Decisive’ is the word that I always use. He was very fast. He was lean, not a gram of fat on him. But he was strong for his age, too. He could beat his marker using his physicality.

For most of that season, we played with three forwards: me, Cristiano and Edgar Marcelino. We didn’t have fixed positions; we moved around, swapped whenever we wanted. We tried things, created chance after chance. We played like complete outlaws. We had such a great understanding. It was great fun to play with him.

Cristiano always stayed late after training. He would take shots, practise free-kicks, go through his repertoire of tricks and work on new ones. He also used to sneak into the gym at the training centre to do extra weightlifting in the evenings, after the rest of us had gone home.

It was him and a team-mate, Jose Semedo. Our coach found out and gave them a dressing-down in front of the whole squad. We all found it very funny. Cristiano carried on doing it regardless. I think he even took some of the weights back to his dorm room.

Ronaldo with Semedo, who is now CEO of Ronaldo’s current club Al Nassr, in 2023 (Gualter Fatia/Getty Images)

It showed that even then, as a kid, he had the mindset he later became known for. He was different.

Was he popular? Not really. Not everyone liked him. His will to win sometimes led to conflict with team-mates. He wanted everyone to be perfect like he was. He demanded a lot of himself and he expected others to do the same. At the same time, he wanted to be the best at everything — every drill in training. He could be a difficult character.

All of that meant a lot of people took against him. I would say that he only really became popular when he started getting called up to the first team, a few years later.

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I was always on his side, though. Like Cristiano, I was a natural competitor; I loved to pit myself against him in training. And away from football, he was a top guy, always keen to help, always up for a laugh. He had a taste for mischief and liked to pull pranks. He would hide people’s socks in the changing room, silly stuff like that. I remember him putting heat cream in someone’s underwear once; a few minutes later they were itching like crazy.

He loved that kind of thing. We had some great laughs.

Two things really stood out in matches: the way he would run at his man and the way he struck the ball. Those were early indicators. They made me think I might be in the presence of a future star — not at the level he went on to reach, but a first-team player at Sporting, perhaps. That is what we were all working to achieve.

Cristiano changed as a player during our years together at Sporting. He became more agile, much more of a dribbler. That was the Ronaldo you saw at Manchester United. When he moved to Real Madrid, he started to move away from that. He took on different characteristics that made him the best in the world.

We have remained in touch over the years. I feel an immense pride at all he has achieved in the game — as a Portuguese person but especially as a former team-mate, someone who played a small part in his development as a player back in those academy days. Those are fond memories.

My message to Cristiano? Simple: I would tell him to keep enjoying football as much as he can, because a career goes quickly. And I would tell him never to change from the person he has always been.

— Told to Jack Lang