Ronaldo's Last World Cup: The One He's Never Won

Cristiano Ronaldo has scored eight goals at the World Cup, every one of them in the group stage. Across 5 tournaments and 22 matches, the knockout rounds, where the World Cup is actually won, have never carried his name. At 41, in a sixth and final tournament that makes him one of the first three men ever to reach six, he arrives chasing the one prize a record-breaking career has never delivered.

Ronaldo has won almost everything the game offers. He holds the men's records for caps and international goals, 227 and 143, won five Ballons d'Or, and lifted the European Championship in 2016, even if an early injury left him watching most of that final from the touchline. With Portugal he has since won the Nations League twice, the first nation to manage it.

The World Cup is the one line his CV has never carried. His best finish came as a 21-year-old in 2006, fourth place, and the years since have been a run of early exits: the last 16 in 2010 and 2018, the group stage in 2014, and a quarter-final defeat to Morocco in 2022.

Ronaldo scored 28 times in 30 league games last season and dragged Al-Nassr to their first Saudi league title in seven years, sealing it with a brace in May. The complication is the setting: the Saudi Pro League sits well below Europe's leading leagues, and the plainest measure of that is that his 28 goals were only the third-highest tally in the division.

At 41 he will be one of the oldest outfield players ever to appear at a World Cup, and a hamstring problem in February was a reminder that the body is now managed game to game rather than asked to last a full 90 minutes.

The sharper question is not whether Ronaldo can still score, but whether Portugal are better when he does not play. In November, with Ronaldo suspended, they put nine past Armenia, Bruno Fernandes and João Neves each helping themselves to a hat-trick as the team moved the ball with a freedom it does not always find when its captain is the fixed point of the attack.

Roberto Martínez rejected the reading at once, insisting Portugal are better with Ronaldo in the side, and Fernandes was just as quick to defend him, arguing that if the team looks freer without him then that is partly the other players' fault, because Ronaldo drags defenders and opens space.

But Fernandes also said something more revealing, that he would happily sit on the bench twice over if it meant Portugal became champions, which is the kind of thing a squad says when winning has grown bigger than any one name.

Portugal arrive as reigning Nations League champions, and the depth around Ronaldo is the source of the tension. The midfield core is drawn from the Paris side that has dominated Europe, Vitinha among the best players in the world last season, alongside Fernandes, Bernardo Silva, Rafael Leão, and a forward line deep enough that Martínez can rotate his attack and still change a game from the bench.

They have never won the World Cup, their best finish remains a third place in 1966, and Martínez has been careful to call them contenders rather than favourites, on the basis that only a team that has already won it can claim that word. The draw is unkind, with Colombia lying in wait in a group that also contains Uzbekistan and opens against DR Congo in Houston on the 17th of June, but the squad is good enough that the harder questions will arrive later.

The question that decides Portugal's tournament is not how many Ronaldo scores against DR Congo and Uzbekistan, but whether the team is sharper with him leading the line or with him arriving from the bench when a knockout tie needs breaking open. Martínez has the deepest, most balanced Portugal squad in a generation, and the freedom to use Ronaldo either way. The knockout rounds are where that call gets made.

He has won every honour the club and continental game can offer and has called this, plainly, his last World Cup, and a squad that speaks about winning it for him knows exactly what is missing. Portugal have the players to lift the trophy for the first time. The question Martínez cannot escape is whether they do it because of Ronaldo, or in spite of him.

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