LISBON — The way they tell the story at Sporting Lisbon, they did not even have to watch Cristiano Ronaldo play to know he was special. Seeing him with a ball at his feet, the quiet, skinny 12-year-old’s every effortless touch proof of his masterly control, was enough.

Pretty much everyone at Sporting knows the tale, which is now part of the club’s folklore; pretty much everyone tells it in the same way, with a cadence and cast of characters seemingly straight out of the Nativity. It even features three wise men.

Early in 1997, the president of Sporting’s fan club on the island of Madeira got in touch with Aurélio Pereira, the Lisbon club’s long-serving director of youth recruitment. There was, he said, a prodigiously gifted child in the academy ranks at Nacional, one of three professional clubs in the island’s capital, Funchal.