'You've been trying to kill me for 23 years' - should Ronaldo start?

⏱ 3 min read • 772 words

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Cristiano Ronaldo turned 41 in February. He has scored more international goals than any man in history, won five Ballons d’Or, lifted the Champions League five times and the European Championship once. The one prize missing from the collection sits inside a stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, where the World Cup final will be played on 19 July. For the first time across six tournaments, Portugal look built to reach it — and the question dividing Fernando Santos’s successor, Roberto Martinez, is whether the greatest goalscorer the game has produced should be in the starting eleven when they get there.

“You’ve been trying to kill me for 23 years,” Ronaldo told reporters after Portugal’s group-stage win over Uruguay, a jab at the doubters who have written his obituary since his Sporting debut in 2002. He then set up two goals and missed a penalty. The line, and the performance, captured the contradiction Martinez must resolve.

The numbers behind the debate

Ronaldo has appeared at every World Cup since 2006. He has scored in five different editions — a record — but only eight goals in 22 matches, and none in the knockout rounds since 2006. In 2022, under Santos, he was dropped for the last-16 win over Switzerland, watched from the bench as Goncalo Ramos scored a hat-trick, and Portugal still went out in the quarter-finals to Morocco.

This time the supporting cast is stronger. Rafael Leao has been Portugal’s most dangerous attacker, Bruno Fernandes is orchestrating from midfield, and 20-year-old Joao Neves has given the side control it lacked three years ago. Ronaldo, now with Al-Nassr in the Saudi Pro League, remains a penalty-box finisher of rare instinct but no longer presses, tracks back, or stretches defences the way Martinez’s system demands. Portugal average 14.2 pressures in the final third per game with Ramos leading the line; that figure drops to 8.1 with Ronaldo.

Six World Cups — a record shared with only three other players
Eight World Cup goals, none in a knockout match since the 2006 quarter-final
41 years and 152 days old on the day of the 2026 final
Dropped for Portugal’s 2022 last-16 tie, watched from the bench as they won 6-1

What Martinez has to weigh

The case for starting Ronaldo is not sentiment alone. He remains Portugal’s most reliable finisher from close range and their designated penalty taker, and in a tournament that has already produced three shootouts, that matters. His presence changes how opponents defend, dragging centre-backs deep and creating space for Leao to attack. Martinez has also been clear that he views Ronaldo’s leadership as central to a young squad, and there is a competitive logic to keeping a five-time world player of the year onside rather than on the bench.

The case against is tactical. Portugal look quicker, sharper and more balanced when they press as a unit, and Ronaldo’s reluctance to defend from the front leaves Fernandes and Neves covering more ground. Ramos, who scored that 2022 hat-trick and has continued to deliver, offers the movement the system is designed around. Against elite opposition — a potential semi-final against Argentina or France looms — the margins that decide matches often come down to which side can sustain pressure for 90 minutes.

A last chance, and what it means

Ronaldo has said this will be his final World Cup, and few would bet against it being the last major tournament of a career that reshaped the modern game. Lionel Messi answered the same question in 2022, lifting the trophy in Qatar at 35 and settling a debate that had followed him for two decades. Ronaldo, two years older and further from his peak, faces a harder version of the same test: whether a player of his stature can accept a reduced role in service of the prize that has always escaped him.

Portugal have the squad to win it. Whether they do may hinge on Martinez making the least sentimental decision of his coaching life — and on Ronaldo, for once, accepting that the surest way to finally lift the World Cup might be to start on the bench. For a man who has spent 23 years proving people wrong, that would be the most unexpected twist of all.

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