You might be wondering why exactly a real-world soccer player is being added to a game whose cast is otherwise made up of more conventional fighting game semi-superheroes with handles like Rock Howard, Vox Reaper, Tizoc, and Kain R. Heinlein. The short answer is, I don’t know. If it had been Vinnie Jones, okay, maybe, but Ronaldo? I don’t see it.

But there are some interesting connections between the seemingly disparate pieces. The Fatal Fury games are developed by SNK, a Japanese gaming company founded in 1987 that’s now almost entirely owned by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman through the Electronic Games Development Company, a part of the Mohammed bin Salman Foundation.