Portugal were a postcard until Ronaldo put them on the map

There was a time when Portugal owned a startling share of the globe. Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa and found the sea route to India. Lisbon and Madrid sat down with a map and a papal blessing and sliced the planet between them like a birthday cake. Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Goa and Macau all flew the Portuguese flag. It was a rich, ruthless and extremely well-connected empire, with plenty of cruelty buried under the glitter. Gold in the vault, spices in the warehouse, and absolutely nothing in the football trophy cabinet. 

By the time Cristiano Ronaldo pulled on the national shirt for the first time in 2003, Portugal had appeared at three World Cups out of seventeen and three European Championships, but had no silverware to show for it. Eusebio carried them to third place in the 1966 World Cup, and for nearly forty years that stood as the ceiling. Then came the golden generation of Figo, Rui Costa and Deco, a group who were prettier to watch but no more decorated, and lost a Euro 2004 final in their own living room to a Greece side nobody had pencilled in for anything. That was Portugal. Beautiful kit, lovely beaches, wonderful custard tarts, and a habit of dying gloriously in the quarterfinals.

And then a skinny kid with step-overs and a chip on his shoulder showed up and rewrote the script.

I have to confess something before I go any further. When I was ten years old, in Dhaka, there was a door in our home that belonged to Ronaldo. Paper cuttings of him, snipped from newspapers and magazines, covered it, and then spilled onto the wall beside it. Every goal, every celebration, every frown of that jaw. And every time the glue or tape came off, a little patch of paint came with it, and I got the scolding of my life. I was told, more than once, that I was ruining the house for a man who didn’t even know I existed.

He didn’t. That is the whole point. A boy from Madeira, an island closer to Morocco than to Lisbon, was plastered across the wall of a kid in Bangladesh who could not have found Portugal on a map if you handed him a compass. If a country of eleven million people can end up on a bedroom door in Dhaka, that is not a footballer, that is a global export. Scold me all you like. The paint was a fair price.

Look at what changed. Since his debut, Portugal have qualified for every World Cup, six in a row. They have been at every European Championship. They finally lifted a major trophy at Euro 2016, and added the Nations League twice, in 2019 and again in 2025. Three trophies, from a nation that had won none in all the decades before. He retires as the most capped player and the top scorer in the history of men’s international football, with 234 appearances and 146 goals, and he is the only man to have scored at six different World Cups. His nearest Portuguese rival is almost a hundred goals behind. That is not a lead. That is a postcode.

Fine, you can argue that the academies in Lisbon and Porto were churning out talent anyway, and that Portugal might have improved on their own. Maybe. But that word does a lot of heavy lifting. What is not up for debate is the change in mentality. Before him, Portugal hoped for a good tournament. After him, they showed up expecting to win something.

And here is the detail that still makes my head spin, the one that turns the whole story into a Sliding Doors plot. None of it was guaranteed to happen, because the man himself was very nearly never born. His mother, Maria Dolores dos Santos Aveiro, has said so openly, first in her 2014 autobiography, Mother Courage, and later in a documentary about her son. In 1984 she was pregnant with her fourth child, money was desperately short, she was already raising three children, and her husband was struggling with alcoholism. She felt she simply could not afford another baby. She went to a doctor and asked for an abortion, and the doctor refused. She then tried to bring on a miscarriage herself, drinking warm beer and running until she was exhausted, and none of it worked.

Read that again, then think about Marty McFly watching himself fade out of the family photograph in Back to the Future. Take away that stubborn doctor and there is no Euro 2016, no Stockholm hat-trick, no Siu, no paper cuttings on a door in Dhaka. I want to be careful and fair here. This is not a story to judge her for. It is the story of a woman in 1984 with too little money and too much weight on her shoulders, and she has told it herself, without excuses. Ronaldo knows the story well, and he jokes about it with her, reminding her that she once wanted to end the pregnancy and now he is the one holding the purse strings. Only a man with a spine of steel could turn that into a punchline. It also explains a lot about the hunger. When your very existence was a coin toss, perhaps you spend the next forty years refusing to lose.

Nor was he the first Portuguese hero. Eusebio was lightning in boots, the Black Panther who won the Golden Boot in 1966 and made grown defenders look like traffic cones. Figo was all silk and swagger, a Ballon d’Or winner who ran the show for a gifted team. But here is the awkward part for the nostalgia crowd: none of those greats ever lifted a trophy in the red and green. Eusebio was the lightning, Figo the violin, and Ronaldo was the whole power station. He did not deliver moments. He delivered decades. A teenager crying after the Euro 2004 final, a man crying on the touchline twelve years later after hobbling off injured in the Euro 2016 final and then screaming instructions like a manager on a caffeine drip. Same island boy, same eyes, twelve years between the wound and the cure. If that is not a hero’s arc, Hollywood should ask for its money back.

And let us deal with one more thing that gets lost whenever the crowd shouts that Portugal are better without him. Ronaldo began his international life beside a golden generation, and he ended it beside another. In between, during the years when he was the best player on earth, he was too often a lone wolf with a pack of decent dogs.

Go back to the 2010 World Cup, with Ronaldo at the height of his fame. His supporting cast included the likes of Hugo Almeida, Liedson, Miguel Veloso and Paulo Ferreira. Good, honest professionals, and let us be grown-ups about this, not exactly world-beaters. They scraped through a group, gave a hapless North Korea a 7-0 hiding, and then bowed out to Spain. At Euro 2012 he dragged his team past the Dutch and the Czechs almost by himself, only for the semifinal shootout against Spain to finish before he could take his kick. Bruno Alves hit the bar and the man who was supposed to take the fifth penalty could only stand and watch his own tournament end from the centre circle. If that is not carrying shopping bags up four flights of stairs, I do not know what is.

Compare that with today. Bruno Fernandes, Bernardo Silva, Vitinha, Ruben Dias, Joao Neves, Joao Felix and Goncalo Ramos is the sort of squad that would have made the twenty-five-year-old Ronaldo weep with joy. By the time Portugal had an Avengers-grade team, Ronaldo was no longer Iron Man. Born in 1985, he was wedged between two golden eras like the filling in a sandwich nobody ordered. Anyone who calls him overrated based on what came after is either ungrateful or has not been watching.

Now, I did not sit down to build a shrine, so let us talk about the bad stuff. Ronaldo has given his critics more ammunition than a Rambo sequel.

There was the armband flung to the floor in a strop. There was the reporter’s microphone chucked into a lake. There was the huff in the hotel gym, and then the exit from the camp when Jorge Jesus kept him on the bench against Norway, a walkout that cost him a fine of $286, which is basically loose change for a man whose watch collection needs its own address. And of course there was the novel he posted on Instagram, thousands of words spread over ten slides, about a coach who had not given him thirty minutes. Ten slides. Jesus, a man who takes orders from nobody, did not blink, and frankly, fair play to him.

The sad part is how the same quality built him and then undid him. That bottomless, almost pathological belief that he could do what others could not took a boy from a crowded house in Madeira to the top of the world. It also stopped him looking at the clock. Think Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, insisting she is still big while the pictures got small. The warnings were there. Fernando Santos dropped him at the 2022 World Cup and Ramos scored a hat-trick in a 6-1 rout. At Euro 2024 he went goalless and wept after a penalty miss against Slovenia. At the 2026 World Cup he touched the ball just nineteen times against Spain in ninety minutes. Against Croatia, Portugal found their winner not long after he was taken off. Roberto Martinez indulged him for years, and critics like Jonathan Wilson have gone as far as to call the ego a millstone around a gifted squad. I get the argument. A great player can fool himself about his decline, and a nation can pay for it. I think that charge is partly fair, and it should be said out loud.

But Father Time does not negotiate. Not with Ali, not with Jordan, not with Federer, and certainly not with a man who believed he could outrun gravity. Ronaldo got closer to winning that fight than anyone ever has. He lost in the end, as everybody does.

To understand why the myth is so tough to dislodge, you just have to skim the club record. Sporting Lisbon first, then Manchester United, where he turned from showy winger into Ballon d’Or winner and Champions League champion. Then nine years at Real Madrid, where he scored between 33 and 61 goals every single season, took four Champions League trophies and spent a decade in a duel with Messi that dragged both of them to heights neither would have reached alone. Juventus, a second United spell, and now Al Nassr, with a thousand career goals as his last mountain.

Yet the story is not only goals and glory, and an honest tribute does not airbrush the dark corners. Kathryn Mayorga accused him of raping her in a Las Vegas hotel in 2009. Ronaldo has always denied it. Prosecutors declined to bring charges in 2019 because of insufficient evidence, and a US judge threw out her civil case in 2022 on procedural grounds. But the earlier out-of-court settlement and the shadow of the case have become part of the record, like it or not. There was the Spanish tax case, settled with a fine of roughly eighteen million euros. And there is the enduring puzzle of Cristiano Jr.’s mother, never publicly named, a blank space in the family album that the gossip columns have spent years trying to fill.

I do not say this to cancel a legend or to defend one. A legacy is not a tidy trophy room you can dust on Sundays. It is a house with a basement. Goals do not launder anything, and scandals do not erase anything either. You can admire the footballer, question the man, and still be honest enough to put both in one sentence.

There is a delicious twist as the curtain falls. A few days ago, Cristiano Jr. was called up to the Portugal under-17 side. Cue the eye-rolls about nepotism and the cheap shots about the surname. Fair enough, the name opens doors. But the boy will be judged on what he does with the ball, a weight his father, raised in a house so small the washing machine lived on the roof, never had to carry. The Ronaldo saga is not quite finished. It has simply been passed down, like a shirt.

So here is my verdict, as bluntly as I can put it. The last weeks of his Portugal career were petty, sulky and far too long. They will fade. The 234 caps will not. The 146 goals will not. The hat-trick against Spain at the 2018 World Cup, the two goals in three minutes in Stockholm that sent Zlatan home, the Euro 2016 touchline, the equaliser in the 2025 Nations League final at forty will all outlive the argument about who got how many minutes in Oslo. Years from now, nobody will remember that row. They will remember a country with a flag planted across half the world and not one trophy to its name, and the boy from Madeira, very nearly never born, who fixed that with his own two feet and a ridiculous amount of self-belief.

Portugal were a postcard before him: pretty, famous, easy to forget. He made them a threat. He made them a headline. He put them on a child’s bedroom door on the far side of the planet, and that child, all these years later, still is not sorry about the paint.

Nothing before him. Everything after. Go chase your thousand.