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Welcome to a very special edition of The Football Reporters, because as Cristiano Ronaldo turns 40 years old,

we're going to be taking a deeper dive into the life and career of the man who became a household name at many of the world's biggest clubs, including Manchester United and Real Madrid.

We're going to be talking about how a boy from Madeira, Portugal, became probably one of the goats to have ever played the beautiful game.

I'm Alexis Nunes, and I'll be joined by some of ESPN's finest as we look back and talk about some amazing stories of the man the myth of the legend himself, CR7.

Joining me now, though, is Rob Dawson and Mark Ogden, two men who got to see this man play

week in, week out, especially when he started off at Manchester United.

And that's exactly where we're going to start the story now.

Robin, we start with you on this one because you reported on this. Talk us through how it all

happened. So United had followed Cristiano for a while. The summer of 2003 was a bit, there was

quite a lot of old people at Altafter anyway. David Beckham had left and gone to Real Madrid.

They tried to sign Ronaldinho from PSG as kind of Beckham's replacement. That hadn't worked out. He ended up

at Barcelona. So United were kind of in this, obviously lucky for someone really to replace

Beckham and kind of give the fans a bit of a lift. As I said, the United Scouts had tracked Rinaldo

for a while. They agreed to, the United Scouts had tracked Ronaldo for

a while. They had agreed to play this preseason friendly against Sporting Lisbon. They'd already done a

deal for Ronaldo, but the idea was that Ronaldo would stay at Sporting Lisbon for another year.

...