When reputation overrides tactics: Ronaldo's 98 free kicks and Allegri's quiet trick

There are nights I sit alone in the press area of Toyota Stadium, long after the floodlights have gone dark, just to replay in my head the sound of someone's boots pressing into dry grass. My job is not to count goals. My job is to keep the moments that numbers never touch. And that is why, when Miralem Pjanic sat in front of a microphone at the Festival dello Sport and told the story of Cristiano Ronaldo, what I heard was not a joke but a piece of the power puzzle inside a dressing room.

Pjanic said that at Juventus, whenever there was a free kick, Ronaldo simply stepped up. No one argued. No one asked. It was an unwritten law. But in March 2026, at Napoli's San Paolo stadium, coach Max Allegri called Pjanic over and told him something strange: if there was a free kick, let Ronaldo take it, then somehow make him leave the pitch. Pjanic did not reveal the whole mechanism. He only said Ronaldo went down, the medical staff ran on, and by the rules a player treated on the pitch must leave the field before returning. When Ronaldo went off, Pjanic stepped up. And he scored from that very free kick. Juventus beat Napoli 2-1.

It was a beautiful moment. But behind it lies another story, colder, and worth looking at directly.

The context few people remember: Pjanic was once Juventus's free-kick specialist. Before Ronaldo arrived in Turin in the summer of 2026 in a deal reportedly worth around 100 million euros from Real Madrid, the number one dead-ball taker of the black-and-white stripes was Pjanic's left foot. He is Bosnian, raised on technical football, and the free kick was the weapon he forged across his entire career. Then Ronaldo arrived. And in exactly the way the biggest star on the planet operates, he brought with him privileges that needed no negotiation: free kicks, penalties, the spotlight.

There is one number Italian media repeated for years afterwards, and it deserves to be placed on the table seriously. Across his time in a Juventus shirt in Serie A, Ronaldo took 98 direct free kicks and scored exactly one goal. The conversion rate sits at roughly 1 percent. For an ordinary player, that is a figure that costs him the free-kick duty within a few rounds. But for Ronaldo, it persisted. It persisted for a reason that has nothing to do with the pitch.

Many times I have stood at the edge of the pitch, watching a player place the ball on the spot, step back, breathe, and I understood that the moment is not only technical. It is the ego. Every player is a universe, and tactics are only an orbit. A free kick, for men like Ronaldo, is not a tactical option, it is part of their identity. Taking it away is touching the person, not the diagram.

And that is why Allegri did not take it away.

The key point I want you to see is not the trick. The trick, having a player leave the pitch and switching the taker, is only the visible part. The submerged part is an extraordinarily delicate management decision: Allegri understood that if he openly stripped Ronaldo of free kicks, he would win one free kick but lose the entire dressing room. He chose not to confront the ego but to go around it. He created a procedural exit, a legitimate medical stoppage, rather than a battle over authority.

This is something very few coaches can do. Most either submit to the star, or confront him and burn themselves. Allegri chose a third path: win the match without humiliating anyone. Pjanic, in retelling it, shows no resentment. He says thanks to the coach. That is the sign of a healthy professional relationship, and of a man who has pragmatically accepted second place.

But I do not want to romanticise that too much. Because behind this beautiful story is a more uncomfortable truth: a top club lowered a more effective free-kick option for reasons unrelated to football. Pjanic is a professional left foot. He has the angle, the power, the experience. But he does not have the brand. And in modern football, the brand carries its own weight, a weight that appears in no tactical analysis table.

At the negotiating table, people price the player; the heart has no price. But on the pitch, the price of the brand is paid in missed free kicks. Juventus at the time were strong enough to hide that cost. They still won the title. They still beat Napoli. The wrong did not surface because the right was too large. But it was there, quietly, like a small crack in a wall that is only seen when the wall falls.

I have written about nights like that. On the night in Russia I learned to write about pain: not judging, only touching. And this story, gentle as it is, is also a small pain, the pain of a specialist pushed aside for a bigger name. No one cried. No one protested. There was only a ball placed down, and a man quietly stepping out of the darkness to strike it.

What makes this story more current than anything is its ending. Pjanic did not only talk about the past. He spoke about Ronaldo's future in the Portugal shirt, a subject heating up in the current international cycle. Pjanic argued that Ronaldo's issue with the national team is not form, but a conflict between the player's wishes and the coaching staff's usage plan. That is a very different framing from the usual media approach. People say Ronaldo is old, has slowed. Pjanic speaks of power and concession.

And he expressed a wish that Ronaldo be given a farewell worthy of what he has contributed. That is the opinion of a former teammate, not a news report. But it lands exactly on a question modern football has not answered: how does a team honour a legend without letting that legend become a tactical burden?

Perhaps the answer lies in the very way Allegri did it. Do not strip it away. Do not confront. Just gently create a gap, so someone else steps up at the right moment. But that is a stopgap, not a sustainable solution. Football cannot forever run on small tricks to slip past the ego of the great. At some point, the real conversation has to happen.

A match only ends when people stop remembering it. And the story of those 98 free kicks will be remembered, not because Ronaldo scored one, but because it shows us what happens when reputation sits on top of tactics. I believe the next generation of players will be treated more fairly by data. Not because football has grown colder, but because it is forced to be more honest. And perhaps, when a man like Pjanic retells this story with a smile, he is gently reminding us that even in the light of the brightest star, there are still those quietly taking the free kick of their lives in the dark.