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DOHA, Qatar – Thirty-seven years old, without a club and knocked out in the quarter-finals of the 2022 FIFA World Cup™ after a lackluster tournament with substitute status: Cristiano Ronaldo’s fall takes on a twilight tone and the final phase of his immense career is truly no match for what came before.
Of course, there is no reason to worry about the financial future of “CR7”, whose name has circulated on the side of the Saudi club of al-Nassr, under conditions announced as dizzying by the press. Spanish.
But on Saturday he left the World Cup with his head down, beaten by the Morocco with the Portugalwhich he will therefore have managed to lead to a European title in 2016, but never beyond the world semi-final reached in 2006, when he was still a young first, a compulsive dribbler and ready to devour everything.
Nothing like this this time around. Arrived in Qatar at the end of the soap opera of his stormy divorce from Manchester United, Ronaldo appeared as the shadow of himself, a player who has become anonymous, yet leaving those around him to grumble about his status as a completely logical replacement in view of his sports performance.
It doesn’t matter that his World Cup started with a record, one more, when his successful penalty against the Ghana made him the first player in history to score at least one goal in five World Cups.
But the rest fell short, with average performances at best against theUruguay and the South Korea in the first round. These matches undoubtedly precipitated the strong decision of coach Fernando Santos to leave him on the bench for the round of 16 against the Suisse.
He had appeared on the field for a good quarter of an hour, when the score was already acquired. And except for the unlikely return in 2026, he will not have managed to score a single goal in a World Cup knockout match.
World record selections
He therefore stops there while his great rival for more than a decade Lionel Messi remains in the race for the title and the honors, which have always been for the Portuguese the engine of a colossal ambition, almost “abnormal” like the said Zinédine Zidane, his former coach at Real Madrid.
But the Qatari competition also confirmed that his status was definitely not quite the same, including within a Seleçao that he embodied more than anyone else over his 196 selections and his 118 goals.
These 196 selections, the last honored against Morocco on Friday is also another world record, tied with the Kuwaiti Bader al-Mutawa. But whatever…
Before the 1/8 match against Switzerland, a poll by the Portuguese sports daily A Bola had thus cruelly highlighted the downgrading of the star, with 70% of voters deciding in favor of a stay on the bench for CR7 , perhaps tired of the manifestations of a player’s ego with performances that have become ordinary again.
The Portuguese demonstration against Switzerland (6-1) also highlighted the strength of the collective to the detriment of its individual talent.
“It was a coach’s choice and we have to respect our coach’s decision,” Pepe said after the game. ” Cris knows perfectly well, and the coach has said it very clearly, that the most important thing here is “we”. »
Elimination will undoubtedly revive the debate. But it is clear that his comeback at the start of the second period did not make it possible to remedy the sterility of the Portuguese offensive.
thundering divorce
Barely ten days earlier, Fernando Santos had nevertheless described his captain as a “phenomenon” and a “legend”, assuring that “in fifty years”, we would continue “to talk about him”.
Five-time winner of the Champions League, top scorer in the history of the competition (140 goals), monster of work and demand, Ronaldo has long rejected the very idea of decline and continued to take care of his body, main instrument of his dominance, even when the speedy winger turned into a ruthless centre-forward.
Before the World Cup, he assured that he wanted to push until Euro 2024 in selection. But that was before he found himself without a club in the wake of his resounding divorce from Manchester United, where he returned in 2021 after three unequal seasons at Juventus.
But even him, the stadium god with slicked back hair and an annual income of more than 100 million euros, a star everywhere he has been and a global brand, has been overtaken by the toughness of elite soccer. For him too, time passes. And not sure that he goes beyond his 196 selections.