Negotiating the richest contracts possible for their clients is the primary job description of a sports agent and they’re paid as much as 10 percent as compensation for their blood, sweat, tears and exaggerated claims.

Agents will play a version of three-card monte in generating interest in their lesser clients, while they talk grandiosely about the statues that will be built for their most coveted players. 

Their job, as a rule, is to make you fall in love with their client and abandon all sense of reason and will say just about anything to set the mood. Many of these statements are said privately, but they just as often end up captured in the media for wider consumption.

Cristiano Ronaldo, not surprisingly, is represented by the biggest super-agent in soccer in Jorge Mendes, who is also some type of Scott Boras/Jay-Z mashup as a former DJ and nightclub owner.

Mendes was recently quoted with the type of wild and reckeless flourish that goes way beyond anything I'v ever read or heard before by an agent about his best client:

“Along with being the best player, he’s the best athlete in the world," said Mendes. "Nobody compares to him. There won’t be anyone like him for the next 500 years. He’s a very humble person and a family man. A fantastic father. He’s the son any mother would love to have. He’s concerned about others. There are so many great things about him that it’s impossible to list all of them.”

Athletes, artists, musicians, politicians, scientists, etc. are so often mentioned as destined members of their respective pantheons with their legacies living on forever, but somehow the specificity of “500 years” feels longer and more unfathomable than the abstract concept of “forever.”

Ronaldo is the most finely-tuned athlete in soccer with the quality of skill to match. The narcissism Ronaldo cannot conceal is also what drives him to keep immaculate care of his body as though his very existence depended on it. The simultaneous purity of his athleticism and soccer ability makes him an unquestioned all-time legend.

Ronaldo surely spends considerably more time in the gym than he does in front of the mirror, though he’s earned as much mirror time as he privately allows himself with his level of precision and production on the pitch. 

Your enduring image of Ronaldo very well could be him in a black and white underwear ad, but his visible frustration with his teammates not pressing Barcelona at the height of their tiki-taka powers in the Champions League in April of 2011 is the more appropriate avatar. Even with the vanity baggage that makes him villainous if you don’t support his club, there is nobility to the demands he places upon himself and it comes from a desire to chase that mirage of being the best footballer in a time span as wide as 500 years.

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During the World Cup, I wrote the following statements in a single Tweet:

"Messi: Created by an artist.

"Cristiano: Created by a personal trainer.

"Suárez: Created by Frankenstein."

There is an adulation for Messi in that Tweet, while the Ronaldo statement admittedly has a dismissive and cynical quality.

If you want to bet on a footballer from this era being remembered 500 years into the future, it is unquestionably Messi. The odds of a child born with a growth hormone deficiency in 1987 emerging as the best player in the world were incredibly long, but it will be utterly unheard of in 2487.

The sense of awe and magic you have in watching Messi slalom through half a dozen defenders is because he’s seems to have been bestowed to the world as an unexplainable piece of clay. We underestimate the exceptionalness of Messi’s athleticism, the true depths of his ambition and the time required to become this good. There is an unconscious assumption it is innate and that he’s a vessel guarding a gift from the football gods. Messi is a savant and a natural genius in our eyes. This is why we love him and why there will always be wonder attached to Messi as his myth expands.

The sculptor’s marks in the clay of Ronaldo are seen in the angularity of his six pack and pecs and it feels like a brute contrivance. It took hours for Ronaldo to look and be this good, whereas Messi just shows up with his hair touseled and he only cares about the result and maybe how his performance looks.

But while the world romantically searches for the next Messi, the next generations of good, great and legendary players will be created with the Ronaldo blueprint.

The game is moving increasingly toward athletic players with size that are capable of doing everything well. Ronaldo is inarguably the more well-rounded player with the workrate and strength to track back on defense and win the ball in the air in addition to creating goals in just about any imaginable way. Messi will be thought of as a premodern exception playing against competition that underachieved physically and mentally to prevent him from inexplicably dominating.

The model of fostering players in the way of Ronaldo is far easier to accommodate, transforming those supremely skilled players into the type of physical machine he became since arriving at Real Madrid. Ronaldo wants to remain great for as long as possible because of that fundamental narcissism, but he’s doing the work through his commitment to fitness and nutrition just the same as someone like Kobe Bryant.  

Ronaldo is the first of this kind at this level and though he will surely not be quite as good of a craftsman as the dozens of players created in his likeness over the next 500 years, the godliness in that type of immortality will prove Mendes somehow correct despite the magnitude of his hyperbolism.