Cristiano Ronaldo has become a YouTuber. The superstar promises closeness on his new channel. And provides self-congratulation and travel recommendations for Saudi Arabia.
The first video on Cristiano Ronaldo’s new YouTube channel lasts one minute and begins with an announcement. “This is what everybody has seen,” This is what everyone saw. Well, you think, if something follows that everyone knows anyway, why should you stick around, but because the clip is so short, you keep watching and see the footballer greeting from a video wall in Times Square.
A countdown, the screen Ronaldo counts down, with the waiting fans in front of him, the player calls out his inevitable “Siuuu”, then a Ronaldo wax figure is unveiled. So far, so unspectacular, but the video now says: “And this is what nobody has seen”, And that’s what nobody saw. You briefly wonder whether it was worth not clicking on the next video, but then in the next scene you see Ronaldo standing next to his double in a photo studio, imitating the celebratory pose and patting his wax version on the cheek. That’s it, nothing else happens in the video, which sums up the first week on what is currently the fastest-growing YouTube channel quite well.
Everything on the canal seems as artificial as the backdrop
Cristiano Ronaldo, now 39 years old and under contract with Al Nassar FC in Saudi Arabia, is no longer one of the best players. But he is still the biggest brand in the world of football. He has 636 million users on Instagram, more than anyone else. Ronaldo markets himself as CR7, and any child can imitate his goal celebration, although he hardly ever scores any goals that are of any sporting significance. The European Championships recently illustrated just how far apart his superstar status and his sporting ability have become, when Ronaldo was the centre of attention when fans stormed onto the field to take selfies with him.
Ronaldo has been fighting his own aging process with impressive persistence for years. He seems like someone who absolutely wants to remain important. But Ronaldo will also know that at 39 he can hardly increase his fame through great sporting achievements. YouTube is now supposed to help him with that.
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“My channel will give me an even bigger platform to give insights into my life, my family and my views on many different topics,” says Ronaldo. He promises closeness, and the videos will be spontaneous and unpretentious. And in theory, that sounds interesting: one of the best footballers of all time opens up, perhaps shows his everyday life. Perhaps looks back on his career. Perhaps explains how he became the figure he is today.
It’s just that Ronaldo seems about as authentic on his new channel as the wax figure he unveils in the first clip.
In many videos, Ronaldo sits on a leather couch, behind him hang jerseys and gold-framed photos of his game scenes, the logo of the new project flickers across a television. Not a real living room, a production studio; Ronaldo himself once refers to it as the “set”. And almost everything on the channel seems as artificial as the backdrop. Everything seems staged, every game and every question and answer session planned out.
“If you talk about Cristiano Ronaldo, you’ll be on the front page,” says Cristiano Ronaldo
The 15 clips from the first week, in which more than 50 million users subscribed to the channel, rarely last much longer than a minute. They promise a lot and deliver little. For example, there is a video entitled: “This is how I overcome adversity”, How I overcome adversityExciting, you might think, now we find out what makes the Portuguese superstar tick.
But then comes a snippet from an old press conference in which Ronaldo says he went through a weaker phase in his career, for which he is grateful, because “at the top of the mountain you can’t see what’s below”. Even more puzzling is that the sentence is accompanied by a scene from the European Championship in which Ronaldo is gently jostled by a French defender, falls down and touches his head with a face contorted in pain. After 45 seconds the video is over and you wonder: is this foul supposed to be the greatest adversity in Cristiano Ronaldo’s life?
If it is true that speaking about oneself in the third person is a first sign of loss of reality, Ronaldo’s YouTube channel is cause for concern. One video is called: “This is how I manage the pressure of being Cristiano”, This is how I deal with the pressure of being Cristiano. “If you talk about Cristiano Ronaldo, you’ll be on the front page,” says Cristiano Ronaldo in another video.
It is also about Saudi Arabia
Unsurprisingly, Cristiano Ronaldo’s channel is mostly about Cristiano Ronaldo. But members of his family also appear in the videos every now and then during the first week. He competes with his son Cristiano Ronaldo Junior in padel tennis and free kick shooting and doesn’t let the 13-year-old win, perhaps the moment that seems the least staged in these seven days.
Ronaldo’s girlfriend Georgina Rodriguez also makes an appearance. In a video whose title promises to tell you “EVERYTHING” about the two, we ultimately learn that Ronaldo doesn’t have a favorite song, whereas Rodriguez thought her partner’s favorite song changed every summer. In another clip, she evaluates Ronaldo’s previous outfits, who can’t help but laugh at her more critical comments. But his girlfriend has also prepared phrases that Ronaldo likes. “I think it’s a promising project with guaranteed success, like everything you do,” she says on his YouTube channel about his YouTube channel. “With your commitment, your magnetism, this curiosity that you arouse in fans all over the world, success is guaranteed, I have no doubt about that.”
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Anyone who thinks that the YouTube channel is only about how great Cristiano Ronaldo is is wrong. It is also about how great Saudi Arabia is. One video is called: “This is how I felt when I discovered paradise”, That’s how I felt when I discovered paradise.
Ronaldo and his girlfriend are seen strolling along a white sandy beach, the water shimmering turquoise. There are then shots of coral reefs, desert oases, luxury resorts. Ronaldo says that he never goes unrecognized anywhere in the world, that is impossible. But he has peace and quiet on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. There he and his family can be alone. He enjoys that. And that is why he now wants to recommend the whole world to visit the region. Ronaldo puts on a crooked smile, as if he himself had realized that what he was saying made no sense.
Ronaldo did not label the video as an advertisement, so it must have been created out of complete conviction, of course.
The closeness that Ronaldo promises on his YouTube channel remains just a claim in the first week. In this respect, he is no different from most other influencers, who also only sell an illusion of closeness. It’s just that they are often even better at feigning authenticity. But that can still change. Now that his great career as a player is slowly coming to an end, Ronaldo is only at the beginning of his time as a YouTuber.
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