In the 23 years of his national team career, not only Cristiano Ronaldo has changed, but also the entire country. When Ronaldo played his first international match for the Selecção on August 20, 2003, there were only a handful of television channels in Portugal. Now there are countless channels, five of them 24-hour news channels, that have been reporting non-stop since Wednesday afternoon about the big drama: Ronaldo's break with the Portuguese national team. The end of an intimate, happy and complicated connection between Portugal's greatest athlete and media star and a small, sensitive nation.
The curtain on what is currently the final act of this epic opened last week. A good-humoured Cristiano Ronaldo announced in the Selecção's training kit that he had two goals before the end of his career: firstly, to reach the magic number of 1000 goals and secondly to win the Nations League with Portugal.
At his side sat the man with whom he had won the last of his previous titles: Jorge Jesus, coach at Ronaldo's Saudi Arabian club al-Nassr until the summer and the national coach of Portugal for a few weeks. The seventy-one-year-old is one of the very few who calls Ronaldo by his pet name in public: “Chris is a symbol of Portugal and the national team.” Ronaldo smiled and added: "If the coach needs me, I can play, be substituted or substituted or not play at all." Jesus took that literally.
Ronaldo played from the start in the first qualifying game of the Nations League against Wales (1-0). His teammate João Félix scored the winning goal. Ronaldo missed several top-class chances to score and was substituted in the 60th minute - with a slightly annoyed expression on his face.
The Selecção has arrived in the present without Ronaldo
Against Norway (2:1), Jorge Jesus did without the superstar entirely. He let him warm up on the sidelines for a long time in the second half like a debutant and then didn't substitute him. Ronaldo had to watch as his successor in the center forward position, Gonçalo Ramos, did exactly what he could only do to some extent even at the age of 41: high pressing, winning the ball in front of the opponent's penalty area and quickly making a delicate chip over the Norwegian goalkeeper into the goal and the winning goal for Portugal. Jorge Jesus conceived the game with this moment in mind. The victory confirmed that the Selecção had arrived in the presence of top football without Ronaldo.
Ronaldo made a derogatory gesture at the final whistle in Oslo and left the pitch towards the dressing room. The players celebrated Portugal's away win against one of the strongest teams in Europe without their captain.
In the days that followed before the game in Denmark on Thursday evening, the Portuguese football elite tried to calm the aging star's spirits. Jesus protected him even though he never trained with the team. The Portuguese association president Pedro Proença flew to Copenhagen a day earlier to smooth things over. Without visible success.
Power struggle between two alpha males
In the press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Jorge Jesus emphasized one of his absolute principles: "The status of a player does not grant him any special rights. In a club, the president is in charge. In the team, I am in charge. In everything I am involved in. And that also applies to the players." In the power struggle between two alpha men, Ronaldo had lost out - and that happened for the first time in the Selecção environment.
Ronaldo has clashed with several national team coaches in his long career. The football star had already lost his trust in Carlos Queiroz (2008 to 2010) and Paulo Bento (2010 to 2014) before the Portuguese Football Association. He stayed away from the first international matches after the disappointing World Cup failures in 2010 and 2014, thereby influencing a team that was too dependent on Ronaldo's accuracy. Queiroz and Bento failed to restart and were fired by the association. Ronaldo returned for the next few games.
Even the most successful Portuguese national coach to date, Fernando Santos, had to admit defeat in the power struggle with Portugal's football icon after the 2022 World Cup. Santos had relegated Ronaldo to the bench in the knockout phase. After a furious round of 16 win against Switzerland (6:1), the Selecção failed in the quarter-finals against the surprise team Morocco. Santos had to go. And Ronaldo was assigned the Spanish football diplomat Roberto Martínez, who - according to Portuguese football commentators - had signed a clause in his contract that Ronaldo would have an absolute guarantee of starting eleven.
The football association gets more money when Ronaldo plays
There is a financial argument behind this dominance of the former world-class striker. According to press reports, sponsors pay significantly higher contributions to the Portuguese Football Association when Ronaldo is on the pitch. The reach of the exceptional footballer is hard to beat: Ronaldo has around 680 million followers on Instagram alone, making him the person with the largest audience in the world on the platform.
After the disappointing World Cup in the USA, the association was looking for a new national coach who could bridge the ever-widening gap between the sporting and financial returns of the Portuguese superstar. Jorge Jesus seemed the ideal candidate. A year ago he moved from arch-rivals Al-Hilal to Ronaldo's club al-Nassr in Saudi Arabia to help Ronaldo - after three and a half years in the desert - win his only championship title to date.
The personal relationship of trust between Ronaldo and Jesus may have been an advantage. But the way Jorge Jesus thinks about football had to end in a contradiction. The man with the long, white, flowing hair brings an emotional intensity to the game that in Portugal could fill an entire book of stories with anecdotes and short stories. Jorge Jesus worked hard on the long, rocky path from the third-rate provincial club Amora via Benfica and Sporting Lisbon to the national team. He speaks like a man of the people. And no one in European football chews gum as passionately as he does during games.
Ronaldo escapes by private jet
Jorge Jesus is not a fan of Tikitaka. The endless short passing game around the opponent's penalty area was an important tactical component of the Selecção under Roberto Martínez, also because it benefited Ronaldo in the center of the attack, who was no longer very fast but was strong in reaction and finishing. Jesus, on the other hand, doesn't care about possession of the ball. He relies on high pressing, his players' endless willingness to run and quick, dangerous counterattacks. An attacker who only runs when he sees a chance to score doesn't fit into this game, which Jesus chooses especially against stronger opponents.
In the middle of the feel-good press conference a week ago in Lisbon, Cristiano Ronaldo almost unnoticed described how the big drama surrounding his departure from the national team would end: "When I realize that I'm not doing anything here anymore, that I can't add anything on the field, if I'm not scoring goals or contributing to a bad atmosphere or if they don't want me to be there anymore, then I don't pick up my football boots, no, I just take my bag and leave." And that's exactly what Ronaldo did on Wednesday afternoon in Copenhagen.
Only he didn't leave. He flew to Madrid in his private jet. And on the 24-hour news channels in Portugal, a flight monitor app ran for hours on a small screen at the bottom right. The whole of Portugal was able to watch Ronaldo's escape from the Selecção live.
