Plenty of soccer smiles this weekend — smiles from all the right people, the players who bring delight and excitement to the game: the goal scorers.

Let’s start with the old man. Who ever thought one would say that about the eternally young Romario? But here he is, age 41, one of the greatest finishers in the history of the game, still playing at the top level in Brazil and still scoring. He got a hat trick for Vasco da Gama on Sunday — three more goals toward the career total of 1,000 goals he has sworn to achieve before submitting to retirement. His total stands now at 990 — and it is his total, because he includes goals from unofficial games many experts feel should not be counted.

We never had a Ro-Ro-Ro Brazil team — meaning that Romario was gone from the national team when two more phenomenal goal-scoring players arrived, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. We had to make do with simply the Ro-Ro boys, and both were on the comeback trail this weekend. Ronaldinho scored twice for Barcelona, the first from a 25-yard free kick, the ball caressed with almost insulting ease just over the defensive wall of Racing Santander players, and dipping down just inside the goal post, and just where the goalkeeper couldn’t quite reach it. The almost millimetric precision makes it sound like science, but this was more soccer poetry than geometry. Seventeen minutes later Ronaldinho’s versatility was on show as he leaped high to score with a powerful header.

The two goals were an emphatic answer to the critics who felt that Ronaldinho had been playing poorly, still suffering from whatever malaise it was that blighted his World Cup performance last summer.

Ronaldo was another Brazilian who had a 2006 World Cup to forget, and his troubles continued at his club, Real Madrid, where coach Fabio Capello rarely put him on the field. At the end of last month, Ronaldo moved from Real to the Italian giants A.C. Milan, for whom he made his debut on Sunday. No goals for Ronaldo, but plenty of praise from his new coach, Carlo Ancelotti: “He is an incredible talent … the same player he always was — very fast, quick to react, wonderful technique.”

Ronaldo, at age 30, is getting on a bit for a striker, but his most obvious problem has been a surplus of pounds rather than years. Adjectives like burly and hefty appear frequently alongside his name. But Fabio Galante, the Livorno defender who marked him on Sunday, was scornful of such slurs: “Do I think he is thin? Bah … close to goal he is calm and one of the deadliest finishers in the game. You can just imagine how good he will be when he’s at peak fitness.”

Then there was that other Real Madrid reject, another star player whom Capello had cast into the wilderness. David Beckham himself. After Beckham announced he would be moving to the Los Angeles Galaxy in July, Capello scornfully announced that Beckham would never play for Real again.

On Saturday Capello — faced with losses in his last two games and his job definitely on the line — recanted and put Beckham in the lineup. From then on — appropriately enough for the L.A.-bound Beckham — it was sheer Hollywood: Bad boy Beckham returns to fold, scores a goal with one of his patented free kicks, saves coach’s job. As the Spanish sports daily Marca put it, “Capello, You Owe Him One.”

While Beckham was making a point with Capello, his influence was also being felt at the Galaxy, seven thousand miles away. The event was the Galaxy’s open tryouts, and it turned into exactly the sort of circus that has always threatened to strip the Beckham signing of any true soccer significance and reduce it to a money-making marketing and PR fandango.

Money-making? Exactly that. The Galaxy was charging each entrant to the tryouts $130, and the number of hopefuls who wanted some sort of proximity to Beckham or his club grew by leaps and bounds. So the Galaxy put a cap on the number: “only” 800 entrants were allowed, which adds up to an income of $104,000. The Beckham era has begun.

Whoops, almost forgot. Players. How many will the Galaxy discover from those 800 auditioning. I’d say, as a conservative estimate, none. The Galaxy claim to have identified two possibles from the massive operation. But open tryouts make little sense anywhere these days, with scouts and agents frantically beating the bushes far and wide for signs of incipient talent.

There is a small chance of undiscovered talent, but the likelihood is that it will be a Hispanic player, and such players are unlikely to be the first choice of Galaxy coach Frank Yallop — who at the moment has no Hispanic players on his 20-man roster, the only one of the 13 MLS clubs without at least one such player.

Currently the Galaxy look like a disaster waiting to happen. A team that failed to make the playoffs last year, it has so far — always excepting the ultra-soccer engagement of Beckham — utterly failed to strengthen its roster. As things stand, the Galaxy playing strength is palpably weaker than it was last year, for Yallop has been busy shedding, rather than signing, players.

Beckham is expected to play his first game on August 5, by which time the Galaxy will have played some 14 regular season games (out of 34), as many as six of them without its top American player, Landon Donovan, who will be required for U.S. national team duty in at least one, if not both, of the Gold Cup and Copa America tournaments in June and July.

Which opens up the possibility that Beckham’s first role in America will be to save the Galaxy from another season without playoff soccer.

pgardner@nysun.com