Too rude for words? Inside the Cristiano Ronaldo bubble

At 11 years old, Cristiano Ronaldo left Madeira to join the youth set-up at Sporting Lisbon. He cried a lot at the beginning, causing his teammates to tease him. But through the tears he learned how to deal with pressure, which would mark his future competitive spirit. The son of an alcoholic municipal gardener, Dinis, who died in 2005, and María Dolores, Ronaldo is a divisive character. Booed by his own supporters during Real Madrid's recent defeat to Barcelona, he is also the kind of star who has won admirers due to a lack of false humility that is often more galling than bold arrogance.

Some of his pearls - "They boo me because I am rich, handsome and a great player" and "If God can't please everyone, neither can I" - reveal a personality more infantile than malicious. And the Bernabéu faithful, more affiliated to cynical and tortured souls, has accepted that its star player is not a bad kid.

One party-goer said Ronaldo behaved like "uneducated trailer trash"

Since he arrived in Madrid in 2009 for a world-record 94-million-euro fee, Cristiano Ronaldo (a name acquired because of his mother's devotion to Ronald Reagan) has lived in a bubble in which there is only room for the football, his family, his supermodel girlfriend Irina Shayk and, in his words, shopping, the Portuguese player's only vice apart from sport.

But life is different for Ronaldo than for other stars in the Real set-up. While Zinedine Zidane can quietly attend yoga classes with his wife downtown and José Mourinho shops behind closed doors at day's end, Ronaldo cannot set foot in the street. When he first tried to enter a store, there was pandemonium. Since that day, Ronaldo shops from the remote luxury of his apartment in the exclusive Pozuelo de Alarcón district of the capital. "If he wants us to take him the entire store, we'll take it," says a public relations person from a major brand. "Not just because of how much he buys, but because when he appears in a garment the next day it sells out."

When Ronaldo appears in public, however, his aloofness can leave a nasty taste in the mouth. At a recent awards ceremony at the French ambassador's residence, Shayk was due to receive a gong. While one attendee noted that Ronaldo was "quite cute in a Hermés belt," another said he behaved like "uneducated trailer trash." Ronaldo snubbed the actress Tilda Swinton, who was on his table, and ignored the rest of the guests. Not one "hello," nor a single word.

"He made the typical scene of an exhibitionist, he was like an autistic person and she looked really distressed. They sat in profile, they got up during the award ceremony, they didn't take their eyes off their cellphones and they left without eating." At the gala, Joana Bonet, editor of Marie Claire, said that in order to get Shayk on the cover her agents had set just one condition: not to link her with Ronaldo. "And we told them that, in any case, we would make clear that Cristiano Ronaldo is the boyfriend of Irina, not the other way around."

It is expected that Shayk will marry Ronaldo in the summer of 2012. Nothing seems to have put her off the Portuguese international, including when she discovered a year ago that Ronaldo was father to a young son whose mother, according to the British tabloids, Ronaldo had paid 11 million euros to stay away from the single-parent family. She also appears to have learned to live with the ever-present, iron-willed María Dolores, who went from being a cleaner to a millionaire overnight thanks to her progeny.

But at the Marie Claire gala the problem was not harassment by the tabloids. According to Shayk, the couple's disgruntlement stemmed from not being permitted to sit with their party - the model's mother and sister and the pair's bodyguards. "But the truth is that not only had he already said he did not want to do the photo call, he also asked for a private room where he could avoid mixing with the rest of the guests. And this at a party where everybody was as much a VIP as him," said one of the gala's organizers, who tried in vain to explain to Ronaldo that there was a protocol that had been decided weeks beforehand.

"It was a party for 10 award-winners, and he was not one of the 10. Nobody was more important than anybody else but it was impossible to get through to him that he was displaying an attitude he shouldn't have been. All he achieved was to rob the limelight from his girlfriend and display a lack of respect to the ambassador and the rest of the guests."

"He needs to learn to be just one more person," said another guest. "All of us have become responsible for these types of attitude, of the disproportional deification of a kid who at the end of the day only does what is expected of him." Divine, genius or childish; a shy lad or straight-up rude. Only one thing is clear: Cristiano Ronaldo, who grew up with the pressure of achieving and under it became a star, finds that life surpasses him all too often off the field.