HBO's Game of Thrones had everything going for it: air-tight storytelling, characters fans had invested a decade in, a world so fully realised that it became part of the culture itself, until its final season arrived and dismantled nearly all of it in a handful of rushed, baffling episodes.

Nobody talks about seasons one through seven with any bitterness. It's the ending people remember, the one that makes them wince rather than cheer.

Cristiano Ronaldo's last four years increasingly resemble that same arc. A career built on genuine, once-in-a-generation brilliance is limping toward its conclusion in a way that even his staunchest defenders are finding harder and harder to explain.

How we got here

The specifics of this latest episode are almost comically small for the size of the fallout they produced. Ronaldo played 67 minutes in new head coach Jorge Jesus's first match in charge, a 1-0 win over Wales in the UEFA Nations League, and was wasteful with seven attempts on goal before being withdrawn.

Three days later, against Norway, he warmed up for half an hour but never got off the bench at all, remaining an unused substitute in a competitive international for the first time in 18 years.

Portugal won 2-1 anyway, Goncalo Ramos scoring the winner.

Ronaldo walked straight down the tunnel afterwards, skipping the usual acknowledgement of the travelling Portuguese support.

Two days after that, Jesus held a press conference ahead of the trip to Denmark and made his position unambiguous. "I can promise whatever I want, I'm the coach," he said, confirming Ronaldo would again be left out of the starting line-up.

By Wednesday evening, Ronaldo had left the training camp entirely, posting on Instagram that he had made his decision "following the national team coach's press conference, and after a conversation with the president of the Portuguese Football Federation."

 He promised, cryptically, to tell the Portuguese people "the truth" about his reasons "in due time," a line that reads like it is building toward another sit-down interview, perhaps with Piers Morgan again, given how neatly that format served him when he wanted to torch his relationship with Manchester United in 2022.

It is worth pausing on how familiar this choreography now feels: The vague statement, the promise of a fuller explanation later, on his own terms, through his own channel.

The public left to pick sides based on incomplete information while the manager who actually has to answer questions in real time gives his version immediately, under far less favourable conditions. It worked in Manchester, but it seems less likely to work in Lisbon.

How are Portugal doing without him

If Ronaldo's camp believes the national team cannot function without him, the evidence of the last fortnight simply does not back that up.

Against Norway, Portugal won 2-1 away from home despite Ronaldo spending the full ninety minutes unused on the bench. Joao Felix opening the scoring before Erling Haaland levelled, only for Ramos to settle it with a superbly taken chip after forcing the error himself.

Three days later in Copenhagen, they went a step further, beating Denmark 4-2 in a genuinely thrilling contest, Joao Cancelo opening the scoring before Mikkel Damsgaard equalised with a brilliant curler, Ramos restoring the lead, Rasmus Hojlund levelling again after the break, and then Vitinha, of all people, heading home his first senior international goal to put Portugal back in front for good, with Felix, Ronaldo's own Al Nassr teammate, adding gloss late on.

It was their third win in three games under Jesus, two of which didn’t feature Ronaldo at all, and in the one match where he did play, he failed to make any meaningful contribution.

The contrast between Ronaldo and his understudy is not really about raw talent, it never has been, it is about what each man is still physically able to offer across ninety minutes.

Ramos presses opposing centre-backs, cuts off passing lanes, stretches defences in behind and can drop deep to link play when needed, the kind of all-court mobility that suits Jesus's high-intensity approach.

Ronaldo, by his own coach's quiet admission, simply cannot do that anymore.

He knows his energy levels are limited, and one extra sprint back into his own half could compromise the one sprint forward he still has in the tank.

 So, he chooses to conserve himself, standing on the shoulder of the last defender while teammates do the covering behind him.

That trade-off was tolerable when his finishing alone was worth the defensive hole he left behind him.

It is far harder to justify now, because his reduced mobility in the box forces the entire team to be built around accommodating him, funnelling crosses in his direction, rearranging the press to cover his ground, whereas Ramos has shown that simple physicality and agility can cause a defence considerably more problems without needing any of those accommodations at all.

It is possible, too, that freed from his somewhat oppressive presence, his teammates might react with a certain pride, and find themselves multiplying their efforts rather than funnelling them toward one man, which would explain why a Portugal side missing its greatest ever player has somehow started looking more balanced, not less.

The broader numbers, compiled since the 2022 World Cup, make for a genuinely uncomfortable read if you are still arguing Ronaldo is indispensable.

With him in the side, Portugal have won 70.2 percent of their 37 matches, scoring 2.05 goals a game.

Without him, across 11 matches, their win rate actually climbs to 72.7 percent, and their scoring rate nearly doubles to 3.54 goals a game, a figure admittedly inflated by a 9-0 thrashing of Luxembourg in 2023, but a trend that has only hardened with three straight wins under Jesus.

None of this proves Ronaldo is now a burden in some simple, deterministic sense. Small sample sizes distort everything. But it does mean the idea that Portugal cannot win without him has become empirically difficult to defend, at precisely the moment he most needs that argument to hold.

The awe of him

For years, the uncomfortable truth inside Portuguese football has not really been about Ronaldo's legs or his lungs, it has been about the sheer psychological weight of his presence, and how few people in the game have ever felt able to simply treat him as one more squad player.

Coaches have tiptoed around him. Fernando Santos benched him at the 2022 World Cup and was gone within weeks of the tournament ending. Roberto Martinez, his successor, made him a fixture again for two full tournament cycles, starting him in nine of ten Euro 2024 qualifiers and all group games in this summer's World Cup, despite a goalscoring return that no longer matched the role.

There is a particular irony buried in the current situation, too. Ronaldo now wants to play purely as a central striker, the classic poacher's role, the Karim Benzema part, if you like, the player Ramos is increasingly occupying for Portugal with considerably more mobility and defensive work rate.

And yet when Maurizio Sarri tried to deploy him centrally at Juventus, in a tactically intelligent system built to maximise exactly that kind of finishing instinct, Ronaldo reportedly resisted it, unhappy at being asked to play that way rather than drift wide and create his own space.

He appears to want the role now that he once rejected, at the exact point in his career when his legs can least support the demands of playing through the middle against elite central defenders.

His teammates, for what it is worth, have mostly stayed respectful in public. There has been no reported dressing room revolt, no anonymous briefing against him from within the squad itself, just a quiet, collective sense that the team now has to be built around accommodating him rather than around its own balance.

Passes get funnelled toward him that might otherwise find a better angle. Pressing structures bend to cover the ground he no longer covers. It is less open conflict than a kind of oppressive gravity, a sun so bright that everything else in the solar system has had to adjust its orbit around it for over two decades, whether or not that was still the most efficient way to run the team.

Portugal coming together, Jesus asserting control

What makes this moment feel different, genuinely different, is that for the first time in years a head coach has refused to adjust to that orbit. Jesus, who worked with Ronaldo for a full season at Al Nassr and won a Saudi Pro League title alongside him, clearly does not lack respect for the player.

But he has been unflinching about where authority sits.

"It will never be any player that will change my ideas as coach. Never. Not him, not anyone in football. Not him, not anyone, not any president. Never. Zero," he said after the Norway match, a line that would have been unthinkable from most of his predecessors.

Asked directly, after the Denmark win, whether his players remained behind him through the controversy, Jesus did not hedge.

"There's no reason for them not to be behind me. What matters is what we have to do. I know why you asked that question, but things happen, they don't divide the team, and they won't divide us," he said. Vitinha backed that version of events from inside the dressing room.

"We tried to stay out of it. We focused on the game and succeeded. We responded incredibly well. Congratulations to the whole team for that," he said.

It reads less like a squad in crisis and more like one that has, almost accidentally, discovered what it feels like to not be organised entirely around one man's ego.

A history of bad endings

None of this would carry quite the same weight if it were an isolated incident, but it isn't, it is simply the latest entry in a catalogue that stretches back two decades.

He compared his situation at Manchester United to "modern slavery" in 2008 while angling for a Real Madrid move. He subbed himself off mid-match against Sunderland that same year. He sulked visibly on the bench after being substituted in the 2009 Manchester derby.

At Real Madrid, his relationship with Jose Mourinho curdled to the point that Mourinho publicly said Ronaldo "thinks he knows everything."

He threw his coat down in fury at Ralf Rangnick for substituting him against Brentford. He was accused of undermining Harry Maguire's captaincy.

He gave the Piers Morgan interview that ended his second Old Trafford spell, declaring he felt "betrayed" and had "zero progress" to show for his return.

He was axed by Fernando Santos for the 2022 World Cup knockout stages, and Ramos scored a hat-trick in his absence that night too, a pattern that now feels less like coincidence and more like a quiet, recurring verdict from the football gods.

Each of those episodes, on its own, could be written off as a champion's understandable frustration at the slow erosion of his powers.

Stacked together, across United, Real Madrid, Juventus and now, apparently, his own national team, they tell a much harder story about a man who has never once been able to accept diminishment gracefully, who seems constitutionally incapable of fading rather than exploding.

Ronlander = Homelander, and the joke that stopped being a joke

It is not an accident that the satirical YouTube channel 442oons has portrayed Ronaldo as "Ronlander," a direct parody of Homelander, the preening, image-obsessed, dangerously self-regarding superhero from Amazon Prime's ‘The Boys’ who believes his own myth so completely that he can no longer distinguish adoration from entitlement.

It started as a joke about vanity and the "SIUUU" celebration industrial complex. It has, over the last year, stopped feeling entirely like a joke.

Social media has run with the same comparison increasingly earnestly, and watching Ronaldo march down the tunnel in Oslo without acknowledging the fans who travelled to support him, it is hard not to see exactly what the comparison is reaching for, a figure whose public mask of benevolence slips the moment the adulation isn't flowing on his own precise terms.

The same week, two very different farewells

Which brings us to the cruellest detail of all. In the same seven-eight day span as this entire saga, Lionel Messi, Ronaldo's eternal rival, the player this sport has spent twenty years unable to stop comparing him to, will play his final match for Argentina against Benin in Buenos Aires, receive a formal farewell and an honorary doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires, and be sent off as, in the university's own words, "an example of excellence and humility."

Messi announced his international retirement himself, on his own terms, citing younger players who deserved their chance, and will exit to an entire stadium built around celebrating him rather than arguing about him.

Ronaldo, 146 international goals and 234 caps deep into the most statistically dominant career men's international football has ever produced, is choosing, instead, to make his likely final act a private jet out of Copenhagen and a cryptic Instagram post promising a fuller explanation later.

Nobody made him do that. Not Jesus, not the federation, not Father Time, who comes for everyone eventually and was always going to come for him too.

He has simply chosen, again, as he so often has, to make the ending about himself rather than about the team he is leaving behind.

History will remember the 146 goals regardless. But it will also remember that, right at the very end, with a far gentler exit sitting right there in front of him if he'd wanted it, Cristiano Ronaldo had no one left to blame for how this part of the story closed but himself.