One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Did Portugal have to wait for Cristiano Ronaldo to not be their best player to finally win?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group K preview. You can also read previews of Colombia, Uzbekistan, and DR Congo.
Did Portugal have to wait for Cristiano Ronaldo to not be their best player to finally win?
Cristiano Ronaldo has had a weird international career, for reasons that are mostly not his fault.
He will more than likely retire as the greatest goalscorer the international game has ever seen. He is currently sitting at 143 goals across an astounding 23 years of top-level international soccer, a record that is very unlikely to ever be broken.
But the thing about Ronaldo for Portugal is that the timing was a little off, inasmuch as there can be bad timing for one of the great players in world history to play for a team for a quarter century. There was a period when Portugal had a pretty solid core of great players, and there was a period of time when Ronaldo was arguably the best player in the world, and those two windows of time overlapped for about two years at the very start of his career.
Ronaldo’s time with Portugal started by reaching the 2004 Euros finals and the 2006 World Cup semifinal with unquestioned greats like Luís Figo and Rui Costa and Ricado Carvalho as teammates. Then he spent 20 years trying to carry their replacements himself, which led to a lot of goals scored, a lot of tournament exits in the early knockout rounds, and one miracle title at Euro 2016.
The World Cup has long been Ronaldo’s white whale, possibly even more so now that Messi has one. That 2022 tournament was arguably a low point for Cristiano Ronaldo, a messy tournament that was undermined by an unbelievably catty attempt to either leave Manchester United or force them to fire their coach and then featured Portugal immediately putting together their best offensive performance of the tournament after benching him in the round of 16.
Four years later, this is a fundamentally changed Portugal team. They are finally very good — great even — and Ronaldo is not their best player. Despite Ronaldo’s likely continued presence up top, Portugal are going to go as far as their midfield takes them. In every game, Portugal will feature some combination of João Neves, Vitinha, Bernardo Silva, and Bruno Fernandes in the three midfield positions, with the possibility that Silva plays on the wing and all four of those guys are on the field at the same time.
Those are four of the most skilled midfield players in Europe: Neves and Vitinha form the backbone of Paris Saint-Germain’s unrelenting pressing and ball circulating midfield, and Fernandes is fresh off breaking the Premier League all-time assists record. Silva meanwhile spent the past decade as a sort of high-powered building super of a footballer for Manchester City, doing a little bit of everything every season to plug holes, fix problems, and help one of the best teams in the world win everything there is to win.
On defense — but also kind of wherever he wants to go on the pitch — Nuno Mendes will be the star of the team. The consensus best left back in the world, Mendes is smooth, skilled, and fast, and also can throw the ball hilariously far.
This sounds like a team perfectly set up for Cristiano Ronaldo to come in at striker and feast. Yet since he moved to Saudi Arabia in 2022 Ronaldo’s record against good teams in big tournaments is poor. 1Which, it is always worth noting, he did right after he told Piers Morgan that he wanted to stay in Europe and that the only reason he would go to Saudi Arabia would be if he only cared about making a lot of money. He was held goalless in 485 minutes of football at the last Euros, although a couple goals against Germany and Spain at last summer’s Nations League finals might mean he is back on track.
Head coach Roberto Martinez is faced with the challenge, then, of figuring out what you do with Cristiano Ronaldo when he is your fifth or sixth most valuable player. Ideally, that will mean setting up the team to create for him, leaving him to do what he has always done best: Kick the ball at the goal as frequently and forcefully as possible.
But this World Cup is a genuine opportunity for Portugal, a country that is tiny and not particularly wealthy by European standards, to win just their second ever major trophy and first World Cup. That’s an accomplishment that is even beyond just Ronaldo, if such a thing is even possible. But they won’t be able to get there if Ronaldo performs the way he did at the 2022 World Cup or the 2024 Euros.
Portugal might have one of the best teams in the world, and a chance to accomplish the greatest football moment in their history. They just have to figure how their greatest ever player fits into the picture.
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