As someone who broadly finds international breaks boring—and this current double break painfully so—I have to express gratitude to Cristiano Ronaldo for having a complete meltdown over his spot on the Portuguese national team. While his performance at the World Cup was oftentimes funny and almost always more than a little sad, this current freakout is just bizarre. OK, it’s also still pretty funny.
The timeline: On Sept. 24, during the first game of this seemingly endless international break, Ronaldo started for Portugal against Wales in the first of four Nations League matches over the past fortnight. He played about as well as he did at the World Cup (so, not well at all), and was subbed off in the 67th minute. Readers with a decent memory might remember the minor hubbub over then-manager Roberto Martinez subbing Ronaldo out of the round of 32 match against Croatia, a match Portugal would go on to win after the substitution. That controversy had nothing with what was coming, though.
Three days after the Wales match, Portugal played Norway in Oslo. Ronaldo did not start that game, nor did he sub on. Portugal won 2-1. Three days after that, Ronaldo left the national team camp ahead of the Oct. 1 match against Denmark (4-2 win for Portugal), and did not show up to the final match of the break on Oct. 4 against Norway again, this time in Portugal. (You know where I’m going with this: Portugal won 2-1.) In the middle of all that, Portuguese newspaper O Jogo reported that Ronaldo hadn’t just taken his ball and gone home, but had in fact, finally, retired from the national team.
After a week of confusion and sniping back and forth in the press, Ronaldo released a statement on his Instagram on Tuesday that both clarified the situation and threw a Molotov cocktail into the national team. The 11-slide post (one is a photo of himself, of course, but the remaining 10 are the statement) is meandering, accusatory, narcissistic, and defensive. In other words, it is Ronaldo as he lives and breathes in 2026.
Ronaldo first claims that he had a letter ready to go for Portuguese fans after the World Cup, explaining his eventual retirement, but then he states that Pedro Proença, the president of the Portugal federation, asked him to reconsider. He then gets into the meat of his current issue, which is with current coach Jorge Jesus, who took over the job on July 10, right after Portugal’s round of 16 exit at the World Cup. According to Ronaldo, the two met soon after Jesus was hired to talk about the 41-year-old’s future role on the team. Specifically, Jesus floated a plan wherein Ronaldo would play the first game of the break (in Portugal vs. Wales) then stay back and rejoin the team for the fourth match (against Norway, again back in Portugal). Ronaldo says he “refused this proposal immediately,” saying that he “was still captain of our team” and that it would set a bad example if he did not travel to Norway and Denmark, even if he were not going to play. Jesus supposedly agreed, and this is where the problems began.
According to the statement, Ronaldo was not meant to play against Norway and Denmark, but Jesus asked him the day of the Norway match if he would be “OK” playing 30 minutes. Ronaldo says he wasn’t planning on it but that he “obviously” said yes, and that he warmed up and was ready to go, only for Jesus to never sub him on. Ronaldo, by his own admission, pouted after the match, and said that he wanted to be left alone, choosing to not go meet the fans who had traveled to Norway to see him. Two days later, he met with Jesus and Al-Nassr (Ronaldo's club) sporting director Simão Coutinho for a “frank” conversation that, according to Ronaldo, ended with Jesus agreeing to give a press conference where he would share eight talking points, pre-approved by Ronaldo, that would smooth the issue over.
The proposed talking points are incredible, as is the fact that Ronaldo shared them with the world with seemingly no sense for how insane they make him look. He wanted Jesus to get in front of the press and say, "I made a mistake in having someone of the stature of Pelé or Maradona warm up and then not putting him in the game. If it were today, I would not do it.” And also, ”I want Cristiano in the National Team. In fact, I don’t want him a little, I want him a lot.” It’s really worth reading all eight points in their entirety to really grasp what the tone of this supposed conversation was:
Of course, given that Ronaldo left the camp and seemingly retired, Jesus did not share these eight points in a press conference. Instead, they only saw the light of day on Tuesday, as Ronaldo decided to release them in between a bunch of passive-aggressive blaming and some uncharacteristic self-flagellation. It’s a really bizarre document, this statement, and it doesn’t really clear anything up regarding the future of his career with the national team. On the one hand, he mentions a possible farewell match (saying “one or more,” because one is probably not enough for his ego), but on the other, he says that “nobody gives anything to anybody.” He then doubles back again to say that, after he serves a suspension for his behavior this break (a suspension he’s basically begging for, even though no one really has talked about that in comparison to the chatter about his retirement), he will be ready to "compete" for the national team once more.
Jesus was asked on Wednesday to comment on Ronaldo's statement, and he responded the way you might expect him to respond to a madman raving on the street: “I read the statement and now, like I do every day, I'm going to the Federation headquarters to work, to think about the Portuguese national team. I have nothing more to say”
And so now, no one is in a comfortable spot thanks to a temper tantrum and Ronaldo's failure to understand that, at 41, he isn’t the player he once was. Perhaps he realized that his threat to retire doesn’t hold as much weight as it would, say, 10 years ago, or perhaps the bewildered international reaction to his threat to not return to the national team until Jesus is fired woke him up to his true value. Whatever the case, Ronaldo is in limbo, Portugal keeps winning games without him, and no one outside of Portugal's diehards is all that fussed about the way his legacy is continuing to fall apart in front of his own inwardly facing eyes. At least his statement was properly deluded and characteristically self-involved, which is perhaps Ronaldo’s most fitting legacy of all.
