Ronaldo’s Last World Cup: The Question Splitting Portugal Before a Ball Is Kicked
Cristiano Ronaldo is 41, he has confirmed this is his last World Cup, and he is about to become only the third man to play at a sixth. Yet the loudest conversation in Portugal is not about sending him off in style. It is about whether the team has a better chance of actually winning the thing without him in the starting eleven. Here is why that argument exists, what the numbers really say, and the call Roberto Martinez has to make when Portugal open against DR Congo on 17 June.
There is a version of this summer that writes itself. Ronaldo, the most decorated forward of his generation, strides out for one final World Cup, scores the goal that draws him level with a national icon, and lifts the one major trophy that has always escaped him. Perfect closing chapter, roll the credits. The trouble is that a large slice of his own country is no longer sure it wants the story told that way, and they are not whispering about it any more.
For years, questioning Ronaldo’s place in the Portugal side felt close to off limits. That has changed. The debate is now front and centre in the Portuguese media, and it lands at the most awkward possible moment: the week a tournament begins.
A Farewell Nobody Doubts, and a Selection Everybody Argues About
Start with the parts that are not in dispute. Ronaldo is the all time leading scorer in international football, with 143 goals to his name. He has found the net at every one of his five previous World Cups, a run of relevance that few players in history can match. He sits on eight World Cup goals, needing just one more to draw level with Eusebio’s Portuguese record of nine. By any measure, the career is monumental, and 2026 is the curtain call.
What is in dispute is whether the version of Ronaldo arriving this summer should be the first name on the team sheet. He turned 41 this year. The scrutiny that built around his role after Qatar 2022 has not faded, it has hardened. Where pundits once tip toed, they now say the quiet part out loud, and they do it on national television.
The Numbers Both Camps Keep Throwing At Each Other
The case for leaving him out rests heavily on two scorelines. Portugal’s most emphatic results of this qualifying cycle both arrived in games Ronaldo did not feature in: a 9-0 demolition of Luxembourg in Faro back in September 2023, and a 9-1 rout of Armenia in Porto last November. Each time the team ran riot without their captain, the same question came roaring back, a little louder than before.
Some of the bluntest assessments come from people who have nothing to prove. Antonio Simoes, who finished third at the 1966 World Cup with Portugal, drew a line many would once have found unthinkable, suggesting Ronaldo “plays to be the main figure” rather than purely to win, and contrasting him with Eusebio. Sofia Oliveira, a pundit across CNN Portugal, DAZN Portugal and TSF radio, went further still, arguing he no longer has the legs to start for a side with genuine designs on the trophy. Her sharper point, though, was about preparation: Portugal, she said, simply have not got themselves ready to play without him.
The other camp has its own favourite number, and Martinez reaches for it every time he is asked. Twenty five goals in Ronaldo’s last 31 appearances for the Selecao. That is not the output of a passenger. His teammates back the sentiment, even if the language gives away how the conversation has shifted. Ricardo, the former goalkeeper now on the coaching staff, joked that Ronaldo has gone from running at 200 kilometres an hour to a mere 195, still quick enough to terrify defences. Abel Xavier leaned on the intangibles instead, pointing to the big game temperament and the way younger players still look to him.
The Call Martinez Cannot Afford to Get Wrong
Roberto Martinez took the job in 2023 after leaving Belgium, and the numbers show where he stands: Ronaldo has played in 31 of his 39 games in charge, with most of the absences down to injury or suspension rather than choice. The manager has tried to bat the whole thing away, dismissing it as “lift talk”, the kind of idle chatter you overhear between floors.
He knows the stakes run deeper than a soundbite, because he has watched a predecessor pay for the same decision. When Fernando Santos benched Ronaldo at Qatar 2022, the fallout was immediate, the player’s own family waded into the row in public, and the manager was gone within weeks. Ronaldo’s pull off the pitch is just as real. When the federation announced a partnership earlier this year with AVA CR7, a recovery company the player owns, eyebrows shot up, and officials had to insist there was no conflict of interest. Whatever Martinez decides about the team sheet, he is making a football call inside a political storm.
Verdict: Portugal’s Real Problem Is the Plan B They Never Built
So, are Portugal better without Ronaldo? The honest answer is that the question is almost impossible to settle, and that is the most damning part of it. A team spends the better part of two decades constructing everything around one player, and then wonders aloud whether it would be stronger if he stepped aside. You cannot be confident of life without someone you never built a replacement for. That, more than any single selection, is the gap Portugal carry into the tournament.
For all the noise, the likelihood is that the campaign runs through Ronaldo from the first whistle, exactly as it has since 2004. He will start, he will chase that ninth World Cup goal, and Portugal will spend the summer doing the thing they always do, which is discovering who they are with him on the pitch while quietly wondering what they might be without him. It begins against DR Congo on 17 June, and the first team sheet will tell you plenty about which way Martinez is leaning.
What to watch for once it starts
- Whether Ronaldo starts the opener or gets eased in from the bench
- How the supporting cast performs in any minutes he sits out
- His pursuit of the goal that would match, then beat, Eusebio’s Portuguese World Cup record