Moreira's two idols show the winger he wants to become
Diego Moreira calls Eden Hazard an inspiration and Cristiano Ronaldo his favourite player ahead of the derby della Madonnina, and the contrast says plenty about the game he is trying to build.
Diego Moreira says compatriot Eden Hazard remains "an inspiration" but that Cristiano Ronaldo is his "favourite player" and, in his words, simply "the greatest." The Milan winger made the comments to DAZN on the eve of Saturday's derby della Madonnina, according to Football Italia, after the broadcaster showed him photographs of footballers who shaped him.
On Hazard, a fellow Belgian, Moreira was blunt: "Crack." He added that watching him play "only drives you to be better every day" and called him "a crazy player" he wanted to thank "for what he did for football."
The Ronaldo answer ran longer and carried more weight. Asked if the Portuguese was his favourite, Moreira replied "Yes, by far," explaining that he even tried to copy his hairstyle as a boy before his own hair made it impossible. He credited Ronaldo with making him "believe in myself" and noted that the Portuguese, despite being 42 or 43 years old, still keeps scoring and playing while maintaining his physical condition.
Two idols, two different jobs on the pitch
The pairing is instructive because Hazard and Ronaldo solved the same problem — beating a set defence — in almost opposite ways. Hazard's value came from close control in tight spaces: a dribbler who could draw two markers in the half-space and still find the pass or the shot himself, unlocking a low block through individual quality rather than structure.
Ronaldo's game, certainly across the stretch of his career Moreira is describing, moved the other way: from a wide dribbler into a penalty-box finisher whose end product is measured in goals scored rather than defenders beaten. A winger who names both as formative influences is effectively describing two separate toolkits — the take-on that creates an overload, and the movement that finishes one.
That duality matters for how Milan use Moreira, a €50 million signing last summer who has started the season on the wing, including in the club's Europa League group-phase trip to Bournemouth on October 22.
A winger who can do the Hazard version of the job occupies full-backs and drags markers out of position in build-up; one who can also do the Ronaldo version turns that same space into a shot. Few players at 20 can claim to combine them, which is exactly why Moreira frames them as the standard rather than the finished article.
What the Chelsea-United reference points reveal about specialisation
The timing of these comments, days before Chelsea face Manchester United, sits alongside Planet Football's exercise picking an all-time combined XI from both clubs since 2000 — and that list helps explain why Hazard's skill set was so prized in the first place.
Planet Football credits Rio Ferdinand as one of the earliest examples of a genuinely passing centre-back, a role that only became a demand of the position once build-up play started running through defenders rather than around them. It picks Ashley Cole as the benchmark attacking full-back of the period, someone whose forward runs widened the pitch long before wing-backs became fashionable. And it describes Frank Lampard's trademark goal as arriving late into the box from deep central midfield — a specific attacking pattern built on timing a run rather than beating a man.
Each of those roles reflects a different kind of specialisation that the Premier League rewarded in that era: the passer at the back, the overlapping defender, the box-crashing midfielder. Hazard's dribbling fit into that landscape as the individual release valve when none of those structural patterns worked. Ronaldo, across the same broad period at the rival club, represented the version of a winger who eventually stopped needing the structure at all and simply scored.
Why Moreira's answer is about more than nostalgia
Moreira picked the number 7 shirt on arriving at Milan, previously worn by club legend Kaká, a detail that fits the pattern — he is consciously placing himself in a lineage of wide players who were judged on end product as much as craft. Naming Hazard as the inspiration and Ronaldo as the aspiration is not a contradiction; it is a description of the gap he still has to close between creating chances and finishing them himself.
Milan face Inter in the derby della Madonnina on Saturday, and whichever version of Moreira's game turns up — the dribbler drawing defenders or the finisher arriving late — will say more about his progress than either quote did on its own.