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At 19:43 in Oslo, Portugal’s teamsheet landed and the most famous name in world football was in the wrong half of it. Cristiano Ronaldo: substitute. Gonçalo Ramos leading the line. Pedro Neto and Francisco Conceição either side of him.
That should have been the least newsworthy team selection of the international window. Instead it became the story of the night, and the fact that it became the story of the night is the entire problem with Portuguese football over the last three years.
Jorge Jesus has been the national coach for two competitive matches. In that time he has done something his predecessor never managed across three and a half years and two major tournaments: he has picked the Portugal side that gives Portugal the best chance of winning a football match, rather than the Portugal side that protects the reputation of one 41-year-old forward.
The context matters. Ronaldo started Jesus’s first game in charge, the 1-0 win over Wales, lasted 65 minutes and had a goal chalked off for offside. João Félix scored the winner. Three days later in Oslo, Ronaldo watched from the bench while Félix scored again inside 20 minutes. Whatever the final score at Ullevaal, the pattern is now impossible to miss: this Portugal team creates and finishes more fluently when the ball is not being funnelled towards one man.
Jesus framed the decision as workload management, and he was straight about the reasoning — Ronaldo had played almost 70 minutes on Thursday, and a 41-year-old is not a 20-year-old like João Neves who can go again inside three days. It was polite, professional and entirely accurate. It was also, read properly, an admission that the national team has spent years building itself around a player who can no longer be relied upon to start two competitive fixtures in a week.
Now look at what that arrangement actually delivered in North America.
Portugal scored eight goals in five World Cup matches. Five of them came in one afternoon in Houston against Uzbekistan, a nation playing at its first World Cup. In the other four matches — DR Congo, Colombia, Croatia, Spain — one of the most talented attacking squads on the planet managed three goals in total. One draw, one goalless draw, one narrow knockout win, and an elimination decided by a Mikel Merino goal in the 91st minute in Arlington.
Ronaldo’s brace against Uzbekistan was historic. He became the first player to score at six different World Cups, and it took him past Eusébio as Portugal’s leading World Cup scorer. It also ended a run of ten consecutive matches in major tournaments without a goal. Both things are true at the same time, and only one of them gets repeated.
Here is the comparison that should embarrass everyone who spent three years insisting Portugal needed him in the XI. In November 2025, Ronaldo was suspended after being sent off against the Republic of Ireland. Portugal, without their captain, beat Armenia 9-1. Bruno Fernandes scored a hat-trick. João Neves scored a hat-trick. Five different players found the net. That is not a coincidence and it is not a fluke of opposition quality. It is what happens when a forward line is allowed to move freely instead of orbiting a fixed point.
And then there is Norway. A country that had not reached a World Cup for 28 years went to North America and reached the quarter-finals, knocking out Brazil on the way. Portugal — Nations League holders, stacked in every department, with a squad valued many times higher — went out in the last 16, having scored three goals in their four matches against serious opposition, with their 41-year-old captain playing every available minute of the group stage and the full 90 against Spain.
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That is the contradiction Roberto Martínez never resolved. He rotated goalkeepers. He rotated full-backs. He rotated midfielders. He managed the minutes of players in their twenties with genuine care. There was exactly one position on the pitch where form, fatigue and tactical logic were suspended, and he defended that exemption to the end, insisting Portugal were a better side with Ronaldo in it while the scoreboard told a different story in almost every match that mattered.
Martínez resigned within days of the Spain defeat. His record will show a Nations League title in 2025 and a last-16 exit from a World Cup with arguably the deepest squad Portugal has ever assembled. He did not lack talent. He lacked the willingness to tell the most famous footballer alive that he was starting on the bench.
The second contradiction is sharper still. The man who finally made that call is the coach who knows Ronaldo best. Jesus managed him at Al-Nassr and won the Saudi Pro League with him, a season in which Ronaldo scored 29 goals in 33 appearances. On his unveiling, Jesus said he would select Ronaldo as long as he was in condition to be selected. He has now quietly defined what that condition means in practice: a role, not a guarantee. Of all the people entitled to judge what those Saudi goals are worth against Norway, Spain and Croatia, Jesus is top of the list.
The strongest counterargument deserves a fair hearing. Ronaldo is the leading scorer in the history of men’s international football with 146 goals in 233 caps. He scored in the 2025 Nations League final against Spain, a trophy Portugal actually won. He remains a genuinely elite penalty-box finisher and the sort of player who can decide a tight knockout tie with one movement. Writing him off entirely would be stupid.
But nobody serious is arguing he can’t still score. The argument is about what it costs to accommodate him. A team that cannot substitute its centre-forward when the game demands fresh legs is a team playing with ten outfield decisions and one fixed instruction. A team whose creators are conditioned to look for one runner will keep looking for him even when the better pass is elsewhere. Those costs are paid in tournament knockout matches, which is precisely where Portugal have been paying them.
The honest conclusion is not that Ronaldo is finished. It is that he is a substitute — a very good one, capable of changing a game in 25 minutes. That is what Jesus is effectively proposing. It is a promotion from irrelevance, not an insult.
And this is where it stops being about one man. The last time a Portugal coach had the nerve to drop Ronaldo for a knockout tie, at the 2022 World Cup, the forward who replaced him scored a hat-trick in a 6-1 win. That forward was Gonçalo Ramos, who started in Oslo on Sunday. Portuguese football has produced an extraordinary generation — Neves, Félix, Leão, Neto, Conceição, Nuno Mendes — and for three years the clear message to all of them was that one shirt was not available on merit, regardless of what happened on the grass.
That is the real damage. Not hurt feelings, but a decade of elite development subordinated to one career’s ending. Portugal owe Cristiano Ronaldo enormous gratitude. They do not owe him the number nine.
Ronaldo has had everything the game can give a player: the records, the Euro 2016 medal, the Nations League, the adoration, the statue, the airport. He has also had something no other player has been given — three years in which the national team’s tactical identity was treated as negotiable and his place in it was not.
Jorge Jesus has ended that in two matches. He should hold the line for the next four years, and every federation watching should take the note: greatness earns a place in the history of a national team. It does not earn a place in the starting eleven.
This article is an opinion and analysis piece. The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views or official position of BettingTips4You.com or BSpin Limited.
