This card is here because on the social media scene this footballer is the most followed, on every site you can think of - and if you add all of his followers together, from every site, there are over a billion of them.
He also has a YouTube site.
This set is an unusual one, and it probably would not have been known about at all in this country had it not been for Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro, who was born in Funchal, Portugal, on the 5th of February 1985.
Now he was not, as many think, called after the Brazilian footballer Ronaldo de Assis Moreira, who became known as Ronaldhino - nor after his countryman Ronaldo Luís Nazario de Lima, who was also known as Ronaldo. Though he did eagerly follow the careers of these men as he grew up. He was actually named after Ronald Reagan, who his father liked very much.
Football was in his blood, and his father worked behind the scenes at the local club to where they lived, not such a big club, with with a long name - Clube de Futebol Andorinha de Santo António. He did lots of different jobs there but primarily was charged with the really important one of making sure that all the strips were clean, and set out in the right place for the respective player to wear.
Cristiano Ronaldo joined their junior team aged just seven, and he was good, good enough that when he was twelve he was signed by Sporting Clube de Portugal`s youth team. They paid £1500 for him, and he had to relocate to Lisbon, away from his family, where the club was based. He was seventeen when he made the main squad, where he is shown on our card, which is said to be his "Rookie" card, though there is another candidate for that, also by Panini, the 2002 series of four hundred and forty three "Futebol" Stickers.
His first game for the senior team must have been a pretty scary one, for it was the UEFA Champions League qualifier. However this turned out to be better than he thought, and it also changed his life, for when he was seen by the other countries playing in the tournament, he received several offers, including from British teams, to play for them.
The team who won his hand was Manchester United. The transfer fee was a bit different though - it was twelve million pounds. Then, in 2009, he was sold to Real Madrid for eighty million pounds. Nine years later, he was again on the move, to Juventus - for a hundred million. It does not seem to be recorded what Manchester United paid to get him back, in 2021, nor what the Saudi Arabian club of Al Nassr paid - though we do know that he has a guaranteed salary of ninety million euros, and his income, including advertising etc is in some years three times that. However, next year he is out of contract, so we can but wonder where we will see him next.