the youngest child of Maria Dolores dos Santos Aveiro, a cook,
and José Dinis Aveiro, a municipal gardener.
He has one older brother, Hugo, and two older sisters, Elma and Liliana Cátia.
His great-grandmother Isabel da Piedade was from Cape Verde.
Ronaldo later said that he grew up in poverty, sharing a room with his brother and sisters
As a child, Ronaldo played for amateur team Andorinha, where his father was the kit man,
and later spent two years with local club Nacional. In 1997, aged 12,
he went on a three-day trial with Sporting CP, who signed him for a fee of £1,500.
He subsequently moved to Alcochete, near Lisbon, to join Sporting's other youth players at the club's football academy. By age 14, Ronaldo believed he had the ability to play semi-professionally, and agreed with his mother to cease his education in order to focus entirely on football.
While popular with other students at school, he had been expelled after throwing a chair at his teacher, who he said had "disrespected" him. A year later, however, he was diagnosed with a racing heart, a condition that could have forced him to give up playing football.
He underwent an operation in which a laser was used to cauterise the affected area of his heart; discharged from hospital hours after the procedure, he resumed training only a few days later.
Ronaldo's father, José Dinis Aveiro, died of an alcoholism-related liver condition
at the age of 52 in September 2005 when Ronaldo was 20.
Ronaldo has said that he does not drink alcohol and he received libel damages over a Daily Mirror article that reported him drinking heavily in a nightclub while recovering from an injury in July 2008.
Ronaldo became a father on 17 June 2010 following the birth of a son. The child, named Cristiano, and nicknamed by the family 'Cristianinho', was born in the United States, and Ronaldo announced that he had full custody. Ronaldo has never publicly revealed the identity of his son's mother.
Ronaldo stated that he does not own anentouragearound him, and that he has only few close friends as well. Moreover, he admits to often preferring solitude while working, attributing it to his autonomous way of living, "In football I don’t have a lot of friends. People I really trust? Not many. Most of the time I’m alone. I consider myself an isolated person."
Ronaldo has dated numerous female models, but tabloids & critics taunt his as gay. Ronaldo responded by going on holiday wearing a pink baseball cap, with a pink flower behind his ear. After the UK press went predictably berserk again—including publishing photos of a male friend while he was wearing that gay hat and gay flower—he responded:
“I don’t see what is wrong with that if you are comfortable with your sexuality.”
