If negotiation professors ever need to argue to their students that their negotiation scenarios are realistic, here is a nice article to share.  A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal covered the story of Ronaldo, the Brazilian soccer star, who is interested in making a comeback.  The truth is remarkably similar to the case of Diega Primadonna, offered as a negotiation case in our casebook on dispute resolution, and similar to the case of Sally Soprano, offered by the Program on Negotiation and other textbooks.  Aging star, sidelined by injury, returns to game with creative contract to meet both parties’ needs. 

In March, after 384 days off the field, Ronaldo entered a soccer stadium again, this time wearing the shirt of São Paulo’s Corinthians for a match in an agricultural town of 95,000 deep in Brazil’s interior. Despite lumbering back some 20 pounds overweight, Ronaldo has scored five goals in seven appearances and tapped into a huge fan base in a nation where soccer is called a second religion. There’s already talk about putting the striker back on Brazil’s national team.