Alberto João Jardim was reelected as president of Madeira 12 days ago and one of his first decisions was to have Cristiano Ronaldo’s former house knocked down. Three days into his new term of office, a digger duly arrived and flattened it. “Maybe they will build a statue there,” Hugo, Ronaldo’s elder brother, said, sarcasm ringing in his voice. But it just so happens that the razing of Ronaldo’s house is a compliment, albeit a peculiar one.

You do not have to look far for such compliments on this lush Atlantic island. The “favourite son” cliché he fulfils to the letter, though the competition is not exactly tough. No one here can recall another person to have stepped from its sleepy shores into world reknown. Someone mentioned a poet but could not recall the name. And the football diehards also recall Chino Termura, Petita and Nelson Fer-reira, players of a bygone generation who made the leap to the mainland but landed in the drinking establishments and left their reputations there.

So feelings for Ronaldo here are as warm as the sun. But beyond natural local pride, you could hardly find a more genuine compliment than that being paid just 30 metres down the road from the rubble of his home, in Bar Falcão, an unlovely, everyday, working-class bar run by Miguel Andrade, who has known Ronaldo since they were boys.

“We all grew up with a dream and Cristiano is making it come true,” he said. The day his friend signed for Manchester United, Andrade told him he wanted to be there when he won the Premiership and at the start of last week two tickets duly arrived for the match against West Ham United.

Andrade went with Hugo and Dolores, Ronaldo’s mother, and had his picture taken with Wayne Rooney, Alan Smith and celebrity celebrant Jus-tin Timberlake. His most prized piece of footage is the video of the fireworks blasting and the stadium announcer calling out Ronaldo’s name. He now has it playing on a loop on the bar TV.

“He always comes back here,” Andrade said. And this is the point, the same one made by other clientele and other childhood friends. Once tomorrow’s FA Cup Final is done, Ronaldo will be back here playing pool with them again. It is a decade since he departed Madeira in pursuit of his dream, but he never really left.

So the two most famous Portuguese faces at Wembley tomorrow will not divide the punters here. They, too, find José Mourinho’s tongue a turn-off and when he called their Ronaldo “ill-edu-cated” they laughed at the irony that he also dubbed him “disrespectful”.

When Ronaldo comes back, Jardim invariably indulges in a photo opportunity. He is simply too big to miss. The President even attended Ronaldo’s father’s funeral. On an island where there is little news, Ronaldo is a massive headline – and that is why his old house had to go.

Mourinho’s comments hardly helped, but so frequently had pictures of the small building with its corrugated iron roof been published in newspapers around the world that it was deemed bad publicity. Madeira is no tin-shack island – that is the message. And for the record, Ronaldo long ago bought a far lovelier house for his mother, but it is still a short drive from Miguel’s bar.

So first let us nail those slurs on his education. His school in Madeira, Escola de São João, is a church school and thus strong on discipline and morality, and popular with all stratas of society. His former head teacher recalls in particular Ronaldo’s fine performance in the lead role of a school play about St Francis of Assisi. She says that she always suspected he rushed his homework in order to play football, but that he passed every year.

His sister, Elma, tells a similar story. “He was always in the street playing football,” she said. “The whole family told him to pay attention to his school-work, but he’d just stay in the street with his ball. But it was a good school. The only year that he did fail was when he was 11, when he moved to the mainland, to Sporting Lisbon.”

As for the popular depiction of an upbringing in Third World poverty, that is an exaggeration. Their father was a gardener, their mother a cook. “We worked for a living like everyone did,” Elma said proudly. “Cristiano didn’t have Nike shoes, but it’s not as if he was playing football in bare feet.”

“He was 6 when I got my first job, making aluminium window frames,” Hugo said. “And when Elma started working, too, we did get a better, more stable life. When I got home from work it was 9.30pm and he’d still be there kicking the ball against the wall and I’d have to tell him to go home.”

On the pitch back then, he is remembered for a similar single-mindedness. From his local team, he joined the academy of Nacional, the Madeira club, and neither can recall him enduring a single defeat without crying. “When they were losing, he’d be playing and crying at the same time,” Pedro Talhinhas, his coach at Nacional, said. “We’d talk to him about it but it was his will to win – it overcame his will to contain his tears.

“He was a natural leader, too, even of the boys two years older than him who he was playing with. But he had this troublesome temperament and would get angry and shout at them when he was losing.”

Goncalo Filipe, his former teammate, said: “I certainly remember the crying. We had a very good group and sometimes we’d hug him and tell him not to cry, but it didn’t make any difference. It makes me so proud to know I played with him and that he comes from Madeira.”

These days, Filipe plays third division football and works in a drinks-bot-tling plant. Of that Nacional academy side, the striker is now a mechanic, the captain a truck driver and the goal-keeper sells air-conditioning units. No one else made it in football – or even off the island.

What was special about Ronaldo? Talhinhas acknowledges that he was as good a junior as he ever had, but returns to this burning inner desire. “For someone from this small island to leave home for Sporting Lisbon so young was a very big step,” he said. “He had to go – he needed to be with other players as good as him. But I was concerned for him. Very often he’d say he wanted to come home. But he never gave up the dream.”

He mentions another boy, Steve Andrade, who was at Nacional’s big rivals, MarÍtimo, the same age as Ronaldo and rated his equal. Andrade, too, was offered an early ticket to the mainland, but opted to stay. Tomorrow, he will turn out for Madeira’s third division side, União. And the hearts and television sets of Madeira will be far away with Ronaldo at Wembley.