The big football story in Brazil has been Romario’s debut as a manager. As player-manager, naturally, because even at 41, with 1,002 goals to his name, his appetite for the game appears as strong as ever. His one match in charge of Vasco da Gama was as a caretaker coach, but it left time to consider how Romario might approach important areas of management such as discipline and time-keeping: this being the same Romario who once answered an inquiry from his then coach Claudio Ranieri about whether it was true he’d been on a Valencia dancefloor until 4am by saying: “I’ll worry about me, you worry about the team.”

Something of that tone was faintly audible when Robinho, another Brazilian, 18 years Romario’s junior, faced the press in Madrid at the end of what he described as a “difficult week”. He offered one apology and declined to make another. “I’m sorry for having been late,” said Robinho about his tardy return from international duty to Real Madrid eight days ago. “But I’m not apologising for the party. Parties are normal with Brazil after we’ve won a match and that night we had won 5-0.” Indeed, Ecuador had been hammered. The trouble was, 24 hours later, detailed suggestions appeared across Brazil that some players ended up hammered, too.

Robinho added that “a lot of lies” had been reported about the nature of the celebrations in Rio de Janeiro and has not responded with anything beyond a stern look at his inquisitor as to whether he was in earnest when he allegedly asked a minion to arrange that 40 condoms be provided for the revellers on a night that ended at five o’clock for Robinho, later for others, and left a number of footballers chasing the clock on the way to the airport for their planes back to Europe and their club employers. Ronaldinho arrived late in Barcelona. Julio Baptista made the same connection as Robinho, his Madrid colleague. They were both fined by the club and left out of the squad for the following weekend’s fixture against Espanyol, Madrid’s first defeat of the league season.

Robinho made his first public statements eight days later, and finished off his mea culpas by saying we could call him dumb but not irresponsible. “I messed up with the flights because I thought our game [against Espanyol] was on the Sunday, not the Saturday.” By then, Robinho could get away with most excuses. Restored to the starting XI by Madrid coach Bernd Schuster, the rascal of seven evenings earlier became irresistible in the Champions League against Olympiakos. He scored two goals, won a penalty – Ruud van Nistelrooy failed to convert – and had a role in the build-up to the other two in Madrid’s 4-2 victory. Nights like these are few enough for Robinho, who has yet to have made good on the soaring expectations that accompanied him to the Spanish capital in August 2005, when the “New Pele” was supposed to be joining Madrid.

But his self-assurance, both on the field against the Greek team, and even the way he argued about the rights, wrongs and a Brazilian footballer’s Right to Party left a different impression from the withdrawn, sometimes confused-looking young man of long periods over the previous two seasons. Robinho insisted Brazilian footballers should be free to party at the end of a good night’s work; on Wednesday he played with the sort of freedom barely seen since his debut for Madrid 26 months ago, when he came on as a substitute and dazzled for 25 minutes and showed off his special trick, the “pedal”, a dummy that looks something like the leg motion of a cyclist and which won him the penalty against Olympiakos.

For much of his Madrid career, it has led Robinho up dead ends. By the end of his first season, he was not making the starting lineup. The arrival of Fabio Capello as head coach the following summer meant Robinho began barely half Madrid’s matches, and though he would be influential in the rally at the end of the campaign to win the league, it was a caged Robinho. “Capello used to ask me to track back and defend when we lost the ball,” he explained. “Schuster doesn’t ask me to do that, so I’ve got more energy and I’m not so tired when I get forward.”

Schuster, Robinho finds, is altogether more liberal. Back to that long night in Rio’s Catwalk Club. “The coach only asked me to explain the timetable of my return, not about the party,” Robinho said with a hint of triumph. Schuster, with his mane of blond hair and his faraway eyes, may look like an ageing hippie, but he has made it clear he was unimpressed by Robinho and Baptista behaving like a pair of schoolboy truants and, indeed, that the reports of what had happened the night of the Ecuador game had not passed him by.

The idea that Schuster is ready to indulge the extrovert in Robinho the footballer has something in it; the idea that the coach is all for the Right to Party is quite another. Against Olympiakos, Robinho ran directly to the head coach after his first goal and was told to go and score another. Madrid top their Champions League group and La Liga and they do live in a different atmosphere from Capello’s, where barely a month seemed to go by without somebody being marginalised for an act of indiscipline – Antonio Cassano for being too mouthy, David Beck-ham for signing a contract to go and play in the USA – and the Italian’s sentences tended to last longer than a single fixture. What Capello’s champions did find, though, was the stamina to win a league in the final stretch, and Schuster’s Madrid have many months ahead.

Capello’s champions also discovered that they became more effective when the coach endorsed, indeed pressed for, the sale of their most talented footballer. When Ronaldo joined Milan in the winter transfer window, Madrid had lost four matches out of seven and were third in the table. They would lose only two of the next 17. Ronaldo’s long and damaging history of injury had meant some of Capello’s predecessors granting him a specific practice regimen: so when the club reached some of the lowest troughs of the barren four years between 2003 and 2007, the one-rule-for-him-one-for-the-rest-of-us notion caused resentment among colleagues. Robinho has a long way to go before he is indulged as Ronaldo used to be, but the comparisons have already been made.

Ronaldo, meanwhile, is the noisy ghost of this European season so far. Cup-tied when Milan became European champions, he has yet to feature in their defence of that title or in Milan’s troubled start to the Serie A season. Four goals against Shakhtar Donetsk in midweek eased some of the concerns that without Ronaldo, whose return from injury was again set back last week, Milan lack penetration, but they host Roma this afternoon from the bottom half of the Italian first division. The crisis partly informs the returning speculation that Milan will try to take on another of the celebrated Rs of Brazil and persuade Barcelona to sell them Ronaldinho, who has had a flat start to the season and was left out of Barça’s squad on returning late from the international. This time the tale has an imminent date: Milan will make their offer not in June but January, provided Ronaldinho gets back from his winter break in Brazil on time.