As ever with Cristiano Ronaldo, you’ll believe what you want to believe.
Did he release his remarkable statement explaining why he left the Portugal camp last week because their games are done for this international window, making now an appropriate time to make his point, without distracting from his team-mates? Or did he do it because Tuesday was the night that Lionel Messi was to play his farewell match with Argentina on the other side of the world?
Both feel plausible.
At 1,740 words across 10 slides on an Instagram post, you can’t accuse Ronaldo of not being comprehensive. That’s the sort of word count that starts making the editors at The Athletic nervous in our articles.
We won’t go through the statement line-by-line here, but the short version is that Ronaldo believes a plan was made with Portugal head coach Jorge Jesus for the 41-year-old forward to play in their first and last games over this four-match international break. Then Jesus suggested he would also get 30 minutes as a substitute in game two, before changing his mind and leaving Ronaldo all warmed up but with nowhere to go. And then Jesus, Ronaldo and others in the camp apparently agreed on an eight-point explanation for the situation, which the coach would set out when facing the media, only for him to divert from this strategy when the time came. This, Ronaldo says, constituted two instances of Jesus “failing to keep his word”.
He then apologises to the Portuguese people for leaving the squad in such a huff, before signing off with the hope that there will be at least one farewell match in the future.
You can pick your favourite lines, but a personal front-runner is Ronaldo saying he “decided to leave the camp without waiting for any further broken promise”, like a downtrodden spouse who simply cannot ignore another affair. There is also the sixth bullet point from Jesus’ supposed agreed explanation, in which the coach was meant to say that he “made a mistake in having someone of the stature of Pele or Diego Maradona warm up and then not putting him in the game”. The indignity.
It’s also worth noting that none of the 1,740 words in the statement are “Jorge” or “Jesus”. Ronaldo simply refers to the “Head Coach” or “the current Head Coach”, like my friend who will refer to her spouse of 11 years as her “current husband”, just to keep him on his toes. Ronaldo’s message seems to be, ‘I was here before you, Jorge, and I’ll be here after you if you carry on like this’.
We cannot say why Jesus diverted from what Ronaldo says was the agreed line at his press conference. Who knows: maybe in the interim he remembered he had some self-respect?
Of course, we also don’t know whether Jesus would agree with Ronaldo’s version of events, given the Portuguese Football Federation is yet to comment. Maybe, like the late Queen Elizabeth’s assessment of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s description of life in the House of Windsor, “recollections may vary”.
There are a few immediate reactions upon reading Ronaldo’s statement. One is: why bother? This is, before we even think of his considerable achievements, a 41-year-old man with a wife and five kids. Sure, nobody likes being lied to, or being made to think you’ve been deceived. But also, y’know… grow up, man.
Would it not have been better, or more dignified, to just say nothing? Or perhaps a quick statement that just included the section where he said, ‘Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that. Sorry’, without any of the other stuff? Ronaldo has every right to put his side of the story forward, but you wonder whether this statement, after his departure from the Portugal camp, will do more harm than good.
This isn’t just an English journalist with no emotional connection to the man being annoyed by how Ronaldo has acted. There is a real danger that the people who have loved him for two decades are losing patience. Attending a Portugal game in recent years has been a little bit like a cult gathering: it’s a sea of people wearing ‘Ronaldo, 7’ shirts, reacting to the mere sight of their hero like those 1960s teenagers catching a glimpse of The Beatles.
But how long will they continue to bow down and praise Ronaldo? Will prevailing opinion at home shift? Has it already shifted? Is Ronaldo helping the Portuguese public move on from him, simply with behaviour like this?
More than anything, it just feels like it’s all a shame — so messy, so undignified. Here’s somebody who is one of only four men in the history of the game to make more than 200 international appearances. He also has 146 goals for his country.
Before he came along, the notion that anybody could possibly challenge Eusebio as Portugal’s greatest player was ludicrous, offensive even. As it has turned out, Ronaldo has surpassed the great man fairly comfortably.
And it’s ending like this. He seems to be spending what may prove the final few days of his international career tapping out a statement on Notes on his iPhone, like a YouTuber who said something regrettable in a vlog and is worried about being cancelled.
There will be a farewell match of some nature, the only question being where, when and against whom.
Portugal’s next two games are in the November international window: their final two Nations League group fixtures at home to Denmark in Braga’s 30,000-capacity stadium, which has only two stands (the others are actual cliff-faces), and away to Wales in an only slightly larger ground in Cardiff that usually hosts second-tier club football. Will they be deemed sufficient? Will he want to wait for a slightly grander occasion?
Perhaps none of this matters. In years to come, will people remember the 1,740-word statement after a petty spat with a coach? Or will they remember the goals, the astonishing longevity, Euro 2016 and a generation of on-pitch greatness? The answer is pretty obvious.
But for now, this is how we are experiencing the last days of Cristiano Ronaldo’s international career. Which just feels quite sad.
