The Portuguese superstar remains an enigma as he begins what will likely be his last World Cup campaign.
Cristiano Ronaldo is the most famous athlete in the world, at least by quantifiable metrics like global search history or social-media rankings. And he has long carried himself like someone who knows his exact follower count. A fussy precision runs through everything he does, whether it’s his measured stride and iconic, knuckling free kicks, his various haircuts, the anime-like goal celebrations. The thirty-seven-year-old, five-time Ballon d’Or winner is ready for any moment: he scores spectacular, dramatic goals, and he is always conscious of the camera searching him out.
Ronaldo is self-conscious but not self-aware. It says a lot about how much of a gravitational force he can be that the days leading up to Qatar 2022 were overshadowed, in much of the football world, by discussion of his future at Manchester United. After amassing trophies in Spain and Italy, Ronaldo returned to Manchester United last season to great fanfare. The club where he first became a superstar in the two-thousands, after years of erratic underperformance, finally seemed on the road to respectability again, and bringing its hero back was meant as an affirmation of its renewed ambitions. But Manchester United, with Ronaldo leading the attack, went into a dire, occasionally embarrassing, tailspin. He scored goals but was sometimes blamed for the team’s disjointed shape and sluggish energy. The team has looked bright this year under a gruff, tactically astute new manager, Erik ten Hag, who has largely relegated Ronaldo to the bench. Ronaldo refused to come on as a substitute in the dying minutes of one match, and he has alternated between looking like a sulking bystander and a savvy glad-hander politicking with the press.
Shortly before the World Cup, the British broadcaster Piers Morgan aired an interview with Ronaldo in which the star bashed ten Hag and Manchester United—a transparent attempt to force his way out of the club. His on-field struggles pale compared with the tumult of his life in 2022. His family is coping with the death of a newborn son this past spring. And, in June, a U.S. judge dismissed a 2009 rape allegation against him. This week, Manchester United and Ronaldo reached a mutual decision to release the player from his contract. It feels fitting that the run-up to Qatar 2022—already one of the depressing all-time spectacles of sportswashing—was dominated by a hubristic tantrum.
Portugal has some of the most talented players at the World Cup. They won the Euro 2016 despite rarely seeming like the tournament’s best team. The team’s coach, Fernando Santos, prefers a practical, risk-averse style, which sometimes seems at odds with a cluster of young Portuguese attackers entering their prime. But the slower tempo suits an aging Ronaldo. He remains the focal point of the team’s attack, the one who João Félix, Bernardo Silva, and Bruno Fernandes—Ronaldo’s former teammate at United—all look to feed, lest he glower and pout. In the twelfth minute of Portugal’s first World Cup match, against Ghana, Ronaldo skied above a defender for a header but missed wide. Another time, his touch let him down as a ball broke for him into the box. In his heyday, it was difficult to imagine Ronaldo growing old. He used to look as if he was playing the game at a different speed than everyone else. It feels that way now, too, only his blur of arms and legs tops out at three-quarters output. There’s a desperation to his movements now.
Ghana, the youngest team in the World Cup, known as the Black Stars, missed out on the 2018 tournament. And it enters this one with an inexperienced coach and no clear style. In the Portugal match, the team’s thrilling attacker Mohammed Kudus would turn with the ball and surge up the field with a kind of maverick, Ronaldoesque cockiness. But the first half was tedious and dreary, as tends to happen in the cautious, early days of a tournament.
