Among Cristiano Ronaldo’s many treats is his leadership.Let’s take it back to 2016. Portugal vs France in the final of the European Championship.Ronaldo was taken off after just 25 minutes through injury but when the doctors cleared him, he returned to the bench and spent the rest of the match giving advice and encouragement to his teammates.The hero of that final, Eder, revealed afterwards that Ronaldo told him he would score the winner."He gave me this strength, this energy and it was vital,” Eder reflected, per FIFA’s website.
And it’s his leadership that settles the Ronaldo vs Lionel Messi debate in the eyes of Juventus legend Antonio Cabrini.
"My personal opinion is that Ronaldo is better than Messi, but mainly in terms of leadership,” Cabrini said in 2019, per Goal.
“Ronaldo has proven himself to be a real leader on a lot of occasions and not just on the pitch. He is a leader in his life as well as in sports.”
We mentioned Ronaldo at Euro 2016 as proof of his expert supervision. A new video on Twitter does an even better job of showing it off.
The video has been posted on Twitter by @Jay_RMA. It features three clips from Ronaldo’s spell at Real Madrid, where he showed incredible support to teammate Karim Benzema.
In the first clip, Ronaldo told Real fans to stop booing Benzema after he missed a good chance to score. It came in a 5-2 win over Real Sociedad in 2018.
Then, the five-time Ballon d’Or winner is seen telling the Bernabeu crowd to applaud Benzema’s assist when Los Blancos played Alaves.
In the same game, the Portugal star gave up the chance to score a hat-trick after Gareth Bale was fouled in the area, instead giving the ball to Benzema.
The video has more than 30,000 retweets at the time of writing.
Ronaldo has often been criticised for being self-centred and refusing to make sacrifices.
But the video shows that couldn’t be any further from the truth.