Perusing the Guardian’s football website this afternoon – as I am wont to do at lunch hour, or any other hour for that matter – I came across this quote from Cristiano Ronaldo. When asked why he was booed by fans of Dinamo Zagreb, Ronaldo said:

I think that because I am rich, handsome and a great player people are envious of me. I don’t have any other explanation.

The quote is incredibly funny, and some friends and I subjected Ronaldo to the usual mocking on Facebook. But I think there is something more meaningful contained in that quote, and in this post I am going to try to unpack that meaning.

Cristiano Ronaldo, seen here being rich, good-looking and successful.

Let’s get the obligatory scorn out of the way. It is not surprising that the world’s most arrogant footballer feels that people hate him because he is “rich, handsome and a great player”. Remember, this is the same gentlemen who once (half) jokingly referred to himself as the world’s best, second best and third best player at an awards ceremony.

I also found very curious and interesting how he turned ostensibly negative assessments of his character to actually reflect positive traits. That is, he made the act of booing and expressing displeasure at him a sign of his excellence. Usually, when someone is booed, it is meant as an indictment of the subject being booed, but in this case, Ronaldo claims it reflects well on him. His claim, in other words, is that by booing him, the Dinamo fans were bestowing upon him honor, value, and status, because they wouldn’t boo someone poor, ugly, or bad at their job. In many ways, “I’m booed because I’m awesome” is the sporting equivalent of a corporate interview, where when you are asked to identify a weakness, you actually have to identify a strength while couching it in terms of a weakness (“My biggest weakness is that I work too hard” or some such).

Be that as it may, the most interesting part of that quote is not the first sentence, but the second. Read it again: I don’t have any other explanation.

When reading that quote, it took me a few minutes to realize that this sentiment was, in all probability, literally true. Ronaldo does not have any other explanation for why people don’t like him. He genuinely believes that envy – rather than, say, disgust – is the primary emotive force football fans feel when he appears on their television screens or local stadiums.

Now, we can (and do… and should) ridicule Ronaldo for trafficking in this self-delusion and self-serving tripe. And yet there is something discomfiting about watching the inevitable avalanche of criticism Ronaldo faces for peddling this nonsense. The reason I say this is because to get to Ronaldo’s level of athletic accomplishment, it is almost necessary to traffic in self-delusion. And it is we, the fans, who force that upon them.

How so? Well, by demanding supreme performance after supreme performance. By demanding that players “put everything on the line,” “sacrifice for the cause,” “work hard,” “live up to your salary” etc etc. What often gets unnoticed is that for players to fulfill these obligations — and make no mistake, that’s exactly what they are — they have to be a little bit crazy. They have to be obsessive and they have to essentially rule out all semblance of a normal life for the best part of 20 years (most top footballers lives stop being “normal” at age 14 or 15, and don’t become normal again until they retire).

For that type of dedication, athletes essentially have to make a Faustian bargain: I will essentially become a machine in the way I approach life, but I will have to lose all sense of perspective, all ability to be truthful and honest with myself and others.

Every single time Ronaldo wakes up at whatever hour he does or goes for training or does his reported 3,000 sit ups a day (a self-reported number but one I believe entirely), he must tell himself that he is the best player in the world. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise, to him. He has to believe that he is the greatest. It’s just that simple. How else can you justify all the hours in the gym, the practices, the tedium of everyday life as an athlete?

One thing that I find very interesting is the sheer number of athletes who express something to the effect of: when I’m on the pitch/field/court, I believe I’m the best. Too many athletes say this, across all sports, nationalities, and ages, for it to be a coincidence. And what that tells me is that self-belief is one, a coping mechanism, and two, a motivating tool. It’s a coping mechanism because the belief that they are the best justifies everything they put up with – the travel, the expectations, the media, the fans, everything. And it’s a motivating tool because sport is, after all, about competition, and unless you genuinely believe you are better than the other player or team, you will lose. Even athletes that give an air of outward humility like Leo Messi or Rafa Nadal are killers inside. They have to be.

Note that, in this respect, athletes are less like the people they are most often compared to — movie stars and musicians – and more like politicians. In celebrity culture, winning and losing are very amorphous and nebulous concepts. How do you “win” a movie? Someone might say, well, you win an Oscar, but even that is an inaccurate analogy, because the correct comparison to an Oscar is the Ballon d’Or, not a Tuesday night victory over Sevilla. Celebrities winning and losing, as a concept, makes no sense, because they’re not actually competing against one another. They’re just trying to do the best they can. It’s the difference between running on a treadmill and running in a race.

In politics, however, there are distinct winners and losers. Somebody wins an election and somebody loses. You go after someone and either it pays off or it doesn’t. You have strategies and tactics and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. You have attack dogs and supporting casts. Just think about the language we deploy when talking about sports, the language we deploy when talking about politics, and how similar they are.

And this is why Ronaldo’s statement reminded me of something a politician might say (or rather something a politician might think; politicians would be too media savvy to ever actually say something like this). Winning is hard in sports and politics, but losing is even harder. You end up having to convince yourself of certain things that aren’t true in order for you to make sense of the larger picture. You tell micro lies in the mirror so the macro narrative is not soul-crushing.

So Sarah Palin, rather than identifying her core incompetence for her unpopularity, blames the lamestream media, because shining a light on herself would be too much to bear and essentially mean the end of the persona she has created for herself, and thus her political career. Cristiano Ronaldo, rather than believing that people boo him because he is a preening, diving, selfish, egotistical loser, believes that he is unpopular because he is rich, good-looking, and good at his job. It is a constructed reality that suits their purposes just fine.

Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps. But there is danger in examining your life too. We tell ourselves convenient lies all the time, lies upon which we base whole aspects of our existence. The only difference between famous people and us is that our lies are not self-evident to the world.