Roberto Martinez looked at 33 shots, 11 on target, and zero goals across ten consecutive major tournament matches and penciled Ronaldo in again anyway — and I cannot think of a single other sport where this conversation would still be happening.
This isn’t a debate about legacy or feelings. It’s arithmetic. Ronaldo is 41 years, 132 days old, the oldest outfield player in World Cup history to start a match, and he is completing his Portugal career with a goalscoring record at major tournaments that any journeyman striker would be embarrassed to own. Against DR Congo on June 17, the 1-1 draw with DR Congo that handed a tournament favorite a result it had no business accepting, he touched the ball roughly 25 times, took three shots, put zero on target, and played every minute of 90. Then Martinez started him again today against Uzbekistan.
The stats OptaJoe posted after the DR Congo match have now aged into something close to documentary evidence:
https://x.com/OptaJoe/status/2067325808893468970
Zero goals in ten straight major tournament games. That is not a slump. That is a structural condition of this team.
Martinez’s public explanation for Ronaldo starting Portugal at the World Cup 2026 is, at this point, almost worth framing. Asked by ESPN why he wouldn’t consider alternatives when goals were desperately needed, he said: “It makes no sense to get the best goal scorer in world football out in a game that you need goals.” Sit with that sentence. It is the reasoning of a man who has decided the argument is already over. He has chosen to treat Ronaldo’s historical resume as a functional substitute for present performance. That’s not a coaching decision. That’s a coping mechanism.
Paul Scholes, who spent his career watching forwards and who has no particular axe to grind here, put it plainly: “I think there is only one position a 41-year-old player should start on the pitch. And that’s the goalkeeper.” Thierry Henry, same conversation: “The team needs to score, not you need to score.” These are not hot takes. These are the most obvious observations available to anyone watching with functioning eyes.
Meanwhile, somewhere on the Portugal bench, there is Gonçalo Ramos. You may remember him — he was the player who came on as a substitute in Qatar 2022, scored a hat trick against Switzerland in the round of 16, and earned a start in the next match because the evidence demanded it. He is 23 years old, in the form of his life, and he is watching a 41-year-old go the full 90 in a group stage match Portugal nearly failed to win. That’s not an accident of rotation. That’s a choice made by someone in a building in Lisbon, and that person is Roberto Martinez, and the choice is wrong.
Alan Shearer has suggested Martinez may not actually be “allowed” to substitute the captain — that Ronaldo is simply that powerful inside the squad’s political calculus. If true, that’s even worse. It means the accountability failure isn’t just a coaching error but a federation-level decision to preserve a legacy at the expense of a World Cup. Fernando Santos felt the same pull at Qatar 2022: he resisted all the way until the knockout rounds, finally dropped Ronaldo to the bench for the round of 16, and Portugal still got knocked out by Morocco in the quarterfinals. Martinez watched that happen and is executing the same playbook with apparently no awareness that it’s the same playbook.
Bruno Fernandes is doing Ronaldo’s job and his own simultaneously. Eighty-seven caps, 28 international goals, the top chance creator in the Premier League last season by a margin that isn’t close. In World Cup qualification he led Portugal with 0.49 expected assists per 90 and created 21 chances. He is the actual engine of this team, and he is being asked to drag a 41-year-old centerforward’s productive weight while also running the creative operation. That is unsustainable across a knockout bracket.
The broadcast ecosystem’s role in this deserves its own accounting. For years, criticism of Ronaldo’s place in this squad has been treated as a kind of sacrilege. As fan harassment of Portugal teammates who dare to raise the question has demonstrated, there are real social consequences for people who say the obvious thing out loud. That atmosphere gets built and maintained somewhere. It has given Martinez a convenient excuse to avoid the entire conversation, and the entire Portuguese Football Federation cover to let him.
Portugal might still make a deep run. They have the squad for it: Fernandes, Pedro Neto, João Neves, Ramos sitting there with a stopwatch. But they are doing it in spite of this decision, not because of it. And when it finally ends badly, everyone who should have said something will discover they had urgent reasons to say nothing. That’s how it always goes with this shit.
