Portugal's World Cup puzzle: Ronaldo as anchor or albatross

Portugal plays its opening match of the 2026 World Cup in Houston on 17 June. By the time the squad flies home, the most consequential debate in the country's football will not be about the opposition, the heat, or the expanded 48-team format. It will be about a 41-year-old striker who, by every available indicator, remains indispensable to the brand and increasingly difficult to fit into the team.

That tension, framed in a CBS Sports analysis published on 23 June 2026, sits at the centre of Portugal's tournament. The squad that Roberto Martínez has assembled is the deepest of any Portuguese generation, anchored by a midfield of Vitinha, Bruno Fernandes and Bernardo Silva, a back line built around Rúben Dias and Nuno Mendes, and a wave of young forwards in Rafael Leão, Gonçalo Ramos and Pedro Neto. Ronaldo remains the captain and the country's all-time record scorer. Whether those two facts point in the same direction is the question this article tries to answer.

A selection problem, not a form problem

The case for Ronaldo starts and ends with goalscoring. He has scored in every major tournament since Euro 2004, and his record in qualifying for this World Cup was, by his own standards, adequate: five goals in eight matches. The case against him is more subtle. As CBS Sports notes, Ronaldo continues to command the spotlight while his presence on the pitch, particularly in games where Portugal dominate possession, forces Martínez to play a shape that routes through him. Portugal's expected-goals numbers, the metric that measures the quality of chances a team creates rather than the ones it converts, have consistently been higher in the minutes after Ronaldo is substituted than in the minutes he plays.

This is not a criticism unique to Ronaldo. It is the predictable arc of a player whose game was always built around getting into the right place at the right time in the box. The question is whether Portugal's other forwards can finish at a comparable rate over a six-game tournament. Ramos has done it for Paris Saint-Germain and at the 2022 World Cup. Leão has done it in flashes for AC Milan. The counter-argument from the Ronaldo camp is that one of them will have to do it under the kind of pressure that only Ronaldo has already absorbed.

The dressing-room variable

The framing that follows Ronaldo around the Portuguese squad is rarely about tactics. It is about authority. As the captain and most-capped player in the history of international football, he sets the standard in training and in the dressing room. The CBS Sports piece points out that Portugal's recent results have been built less on Ronaldo's individual contributions and more on the collective functioning around him.

That distinction matters because it changes the question. The choice for Martínez is not between Ronaldo and an abstract "the team". It is between a player whose presence costs the team something measurable on the pitch and a player whose presence buys the team something less measurable but historically significant. The honest answer is that nobody outside the dressing room can price that second variable accurately.

The structural case for starting him anyway

There is a third frame, less discussed in English-language coverage but central to how Portuguese football talks about itself: the institutional case for Ronaldo. Portugal has not won a World Cup. The 2016 European Championship win came in a tournament where Ronaldo was injured in the final. The Nations League title in 2019 came against a Netherlands side in transition. The country treats this tournament as a closing window for the generation that won Euro 2016, and that generation is Ronaldo's.

The structural argument for picking him is not that he improves the team. It is that the squad, the federation and the public have all signed a contract that says he plays until the tournament is over or until the team is eliminated. Breaking that contract mid-tournament, after Ronaldo has already been selected, would carry a cost that any marginal tactical gain would not offset. The decision was made when he was called up. What remains is how to construct the eleven around him.

Stakes and trajectory

If Portugal loses early, the narrative writes itself: Martínez was sentimental, the federation prioritised brand over form, and a generational opportunity was wasted. If Portugal goes deep, the opposite story takes hold: leadership in knockout football matters more than possession metrics, and Ronaldo's gravity, even diminished, drew defenders and created space for the wide forwards. The interesting case is the middle one. A quarter-final against Argentina, Brazil, or France would test whether Portugal's midfield can dominate the ball while Ronaldo's minutes are managed from the bench. That is the scenario nobody is seriously planning for, and the one most likely to decide how this generation is remembered.

The honest answer is that the available reporting does not let a reader resolve the question on the data alone. Ronaldo remains Portugal's most reliable finisher in matches against low-block opposition, and remains a liability in matches where the opposition presses high and the midfield has to defend transitions. The schedule will determine which version of him Martínez gets to use.

Monexus framed this as a selection and squad-construction question rather than a referendum on Ronaldo's legacy, which is how the bulk of Portuguese-language coverage has approached it.