"We manage the Cristiano Ronaldo that plays for the national team trying to get into the squad for 2026, not the iconic figure." Roberto Martinez said that to Reuters in Lisbon on Thursday, and it's the clearest thing anyone in Portugal's setup has said about this situation in years.
Ronaldo is 41. He could play at a sixth World Cup in less than a month. That alone reshapes what we thought was possible at the elite level — but Martinez's point is that possibility isn't the same as entitlement. The place has to be earned.
And by the numbers, it has been. Ronaldo has scored 25 goals in 30 Portugal appearances under Martinez. That's a better goals-per-game ratio than under any previous national team coach. For all the noise about decline and legacy and whether he should step aside, he's been the most prolific version of himself in the international shirt.
Starting line-up or super sub — Martinez says there's no longer a difference
The real debate isn't whether Ronaldo is in the squad. It's what role he plays when tournament football compresses everything into razor-thin margins. Martinez's answer was direct: modern football has dissolved the hierarchy between starters and finishers.
"Now we've got five substitutions. It's almost like we've got a starting team and a finishing team. There is no distinction," he said.
That framing matters tactically. Portugal will be backed at decent odds to reach the knockout rounds, and in those later stages — extra time, penalties, games decided by a moment of quality — having Ronaldo available rather than spent from 90 minutes isn't necessarily a downgrade. It might be the smarter deployment.
The ghost of 2022 still floats over this conversation. Fernando Santos benched Ronaldo against Switzerland, the fallout was messy, and the question of whether Ronaldo would accept a lesser role never quite went away. Martinez declined to revisit that directly, but the emphasis on merit and role acceptance was pointed enough.
What Martinez sees that the noise misses
Beyond the goals, Martinez talked about movement, spatial intelligence, the ability to split centre-backs and drag defenders out of shape. "He's been disciplined to be in the right positions, always executing the attacking patterns that we have," he said.
That's not the profile of a player being managed carefully toward retirement. That's a coach describing a functioning tactical asset.
What surprised Martinez most when he took the job wasn't Ronaldo's aura — it was his hunger. "Somebody that has won everything has the hunger of somebody that hasn't won a trophy yet." At 41, still running patterns, still driven by something.
"Every taxi driver" has an opinion, Martinez acknowledged. His job is to ignore them and examine the evidence. Right now, the evidence says Ronaldo goes to North America.
