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Remember Drenthe and Ronaldo linking up at the Bernabeu? Us neither.

8 random footballers we completely forgot have played alongside Cristiano Ronaldo

Cristiano Ronaldo has shared a dressing with hundreds of exceptional footballers over the course of his legendary career representing the likes of Manchester United, Real Madrid and Juventus.

We all know about the devastatingly effective relationships he enjoyed with the likes of Wayne Rooney, Karim Benzema and Pepe on the football pitch – but what about the players you’d totally forget ever played alongside the era-defining icon?

We’ve identified eight footballers we totally forget ever played alongside Ronaldo.

Mario Jardel

The Brazilian striker – both a two-time European Golden Shoe winner and an alumnus of Big Sam’s Bolton – was at Sporting Lisbon when a spotty-faced young Ronaldo first emerged as a future superstar.

He was actually wildly prolific for Sporting, averaging a better-than-goal-a-game average across his two Primeira Liga campaigns with the club, but a falling out with the club hierarchy – reportedly due to them blocking a move to Barcelona – resulted in him moving to the Premier League the same summer as a teenage Ronaldo.

Jardel and Ronaldo made 17 appearances alongside one another, totalling almost 800 minutes, but they surprisingly only combined for just one goal – Ronaldo’s first career assist was for Jardel in a 3-1 win away to Vitoria Guimaraes in November 2002.

Fernando Couto

One from the international stage here, shaggy-haired ex-Barcelona defender Couto feels like he belongs to a totally different of Portuguese football.

He made his professional debut for Porto back in 1988, when Ronaldo was just three years old. Couto also made the first of his 110 Portugal appearances back in 1990, eventually retiring from international football after Euro 2004.

The centre-back started Ronaldo’s Portugal debut, a 1-0 friendly victory over Kazakhstan in 2003, and remained Portugal’s captain when they hosted the European Championships the following year, but he found himself benched for Ricardo Carvalho following the opening 2-1 defeat to Greece.

Darron Gibson

When we think of Carrington graduate’s early years at Manchester United, we tend to think of him in that post-Ronaldo era at the end of the noughties – misfiring Gabriel Obertan, title tussles with Chelsea, the rise of Manchester City and all that.

But the Irish midfielder actually first broke through during Ronaldo’s final season at Old Trafford, the 2008-09 campaign. Gibson played seven times alongside the Ballon d’Or winner, mostly in the cup competitions.

Ronaldo even assisted Gibson in Manchester United’s 4-1 FA Cup fifth-round victory away to Derby County in February 2009.


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Royston Drenthe

Like Gibson at Manchester United, we don’t think of Drenthe’s time at the Bernabeu overlapping with Ronaldo.

The winger turned rap star famously never realised his early promise across an underwhelming journeyman career that included stints at Reading, Sheffield Wednesday and a Dutch fourth-tier outfit known as ‘Kozakken Boys’.

But when Drenthe was unveiled alongside Wesley Sneijder in the summer of 2007,  he was viewed at the time as one of Europe’s next big stars.

By the time Ronaldo arrived for a world-record fee a couple of years later, it became increasingly clear he wasn’t a world-beater.

He was still around on the periphery in the 2009-10 campaign, making 11 appearances, and remained on Los Blancos’ books until 2012 – albeit with those last couple of years out on loan at Hercules and Everton.

Joselu

Everyone remembers Joselu’s fairytale Madrid homecoming, in which he fired his boyhood club to last season’s Champions League final with two last-gasp goals against Bayern Munich.

Altogether less memorable was his first spell, in which he never made it beyond the fringes of the stacked squad.

Ronaldo and Joselu spent just six minutes on the pitch alongside one another, but in that short time they combined – Ronaldo assisting substitute Joselu – for the eighth goal in an outrageous 8-1 tonking of Almeria back in May 2011.

Cristiano Ronaldo celebrates lifting the FA Cup, European Championships and Champions League trophies, pictured (L-R) with Manchester United, Portugal and Real Madrid

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Fabinho

Like Joselu’s first spell at Real Madrid, Fabinho’s time at the Bernabeu had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality.

Before the Brazilian established himself as one of European football’s top defensive midfielders at Monaco and Liverpool, he made a grand total of one appearance for Los Blancos, a 14-minute cameo alongside Ronaldo, in a 6-2 victory over Malaga in May 2013.

Nowadays Ronaldo and Fernandinho are adversaries in the Saudi Pro League, marquee signings for Al Nassr and Al-Ittihad respectively.

Radu Dragusin

Nowadays you’ll find the topknotted Romanian struggling to find minutes at Ange Postecoglou’s Tottenham. Rewind a few years and he was struggling to find minutes at Juventus, having joined the Italian giants’ academy as a youngster.

Dragusin made three appearances in three different competitions for the Old Lady alongside Ronaldo back in the 2020-21 season before kicking on with a series of loans away.

Phil Jones

“It’s incredible to have him back at the club, he’s a legend here,” Jones told United’s official website during

“The fans love him, you could see that in his first game back at Old Trafford. Just the way he conducts himself in and around the training ground. The aura he has when he’s here.

Like Gibson before him, Jones was very much a part of the post-Ronaldo era at Manchester United. He joined the club as a highly-rated youngster two years after the Portuguese’s record sale to Real Madrid.

Given the injury struggles he dealt with in his latter years, it’s easy to forget Jones featuring at any point whatsoever for the Red Devils since 2019.

But he was able to appear intermittently alongside Ronaldo during Ralf Rangnick’s disastrous tenure in the latter half of the 2021-22 season.

They played alongside one other four times, including a 1-0 defeat to Wolves and an FA Cup penalty shootout defeat to Middlesbrough. Both players enjoyed much happier times at Old Trafford.