Thank You, Ronaldo: The Portugal Shirt Comes Off

He's done with Portugal.

Not with football — he'll still be out there in club colours, still annoyed about something, still demanding the ball. But the national shirt is finished. No more anthem with his hand on his chest and that face he does. No more armband.

And for some reason that hit me harder than I expected, so I'm writing this.

I didn't grow up watching football.

Nobody in my house did. In our building it was cricket, cricket, and then cricket. Football was a thing that happened late at night in countries we'd never visit, involving names nobody could pronounce, on a channel we didn't put on.

Then a skinny eighteen-year-old from Madeira walked onto a pitch in Manchester wearing a number seven shirt that was far too heavy for him.

And for reasons I still can't fully explain, I started watching.

I didn't find football and then find Ronaldo. I found Ronaldo, and football came attached.

So this one is a thank-you note. It's going to be long and it's going to be sentimental and I'm not going to apologise for either.

He Was Not Very Good, and That's the Whole Point

People who joined late have the wrong idea about him. They think he arrived as a machine.

He didn't.

Early on he was all tricks. Stepover, stepover, stepover, and then a cross into the third row. Pundits said it constantly — all show, no end product. Opposition fans called him a diver. His own supporters got frustrated. There were serious people arguing he'd never make it at that level.

And in 2006 the whole of England decided they hated him.

I remember watching a nineteen-year-old get booed by entire stadiums, every touch, every week, for months. I was in my teens and I genuinely did not understand how a person withstands that. I'd have disappeared. Most people would have.

What he did instead was go and have the season of his life.

That's the part that got into me and never left. Not the goals. The response.

What He Actually Taught Me, and It Wasn't About Football

Here's the thing I've only properly understood as an adult.

There's a kind of sportsman who makes you feel small. You watch them and you understand, instantly, that they were given something you were not. It's beautiful and it's completely useless to you, because there's no instruction in it.

Ronaldo was never that.

Everything about him looked built. The body was built. The left foot was built — he was right-footed and he went and manufactured a second one. The heading, the free kicks, the sprint speed he still had at an age when most players are commentating. Even the famous arrogance looked like something constructed on purpose by a boy who'd been laughed at.

And the stories were always the same, from every club, in every country, over twenty years. First to training. Last to leave. Staying behind to take free kicks in the dark. Teammates describing a man who didn't drink, didn't go out, slept according to a schedule, and ate the same joyless chicken and rice for two decades.

He is the only superstar I can think of whose defining quality is boring.

And that's exactly why he mattered to a kid in Mumbai with no particular gift at anything.

Messi tells you talent is a thing you're given. Ronaldo tells you it's a thing you can go and build. Only one of those is any use to the rest of us.

Moscow, 2008

If you want the single moment that fixed it for me, it's that night.

He scores the header. United are ahead. And then, in the shootout, with everything riding on it — he misses.

I remember him on the ground afterwards, crying, before the rest of it played out. Not a composed superstar. A twenty-three-year-old who thought he had just cost his club a European Cup.

They won anyway. He was still on the floor.

The people who achieve the most are not the people who don't fail. They're the people who are still there after.

And I've thought about that image more times in my working life than I can count.

Euro 2016: The One That Belongs to Portugal

And since this is a goodbye to the national team, it has to be that night.

The biggest match of his international life. The one trophy his country had never won. And twenty-odd minutes in, he's on the grass with a knee that won't hold him, being carried off his own final.

Most players disappear into the dressing room at that point. Nobody would blame them.

He spent the rest of that match limping up and down the touchline in a tracksuit, shouting instructions, waving his arms, getting in the manager's way, visibly unable to shut up.

Portugal won it without him on the pitch.

Some people found the touchline thing ridiculous — a man who couldn't accept not being the centre of it. I thought it was the most Ronaldo thing he has ever done. He could not play, so he went and found another way to be useful.

For a country that had spent decades being the talented side that doesn't win things, he was the one who refused to accept it as a national personality trait. That's what he leaves behind, more than any number.

Why I Became a Manchester United Fan, and Why It Stuck

I'll be honest: I became a Manchester United fan because of one player.

That's supposed to be an embarrassing admission. Glory hunter, plastic fan, all of it. I've heard it.

But here's what actually happened. He left in 2009 — and I didn't.

I stayed for fifteen more years, most of them bad. I've watched more mid-table football than any human being should. I've seen managers arrive as the answer and leave as the problem. I've stayed up at 1 a.m. on a work night to watch us lose to teams I'd rather not name, and then gone to office the next morning and said nothing about it to anybody.

He brought me in. The club kept me, somehow, through a decade and a half that offered almost nothing in return.

And when he came back in 2021 — older, slower, a different player in a different team — it didn't work out the way any of us wanted. I'm not going to pretend it did.

But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thrilled to see that number seven again. Some things aren't rational. That's the point of supporting anything.

The Part That's Actually About Me

I've written before on this blog about the version of myself I've been trying to prove wrong for most of my adult life. The one who gave up early. The one who assumed certain things were for other people.

The reason this man occupies the space he does in my head is simple.

The gap between what you are and what you could be is closed by boring work done repeatedly when nobody is watching.

Not inspiration. Not motivation. Nothing that feels good.

Just: turn up again tomorrow. Then again. Then again, for twenty years, including on the days when people are booing.

I'm not going to claim I've lived up to it. I've had more weeks of Ronaldo's discipline in theory than in practice, and anyone who has watched me abandon a gym routine can confirm it.

But the standard exists in my head because of him. And having a standard you fail to meet is a completely different life from having no standard at all.

So — Thank You

Thank you for making a cricket-obsessed kid stay up past midnight for a sport nobody around him cared about.

Thank you for being visibly, obviously manufactured — for showing an ordinary boy that greatness has a method and not just a bloodline.

Thank you for the fifteen difficult years of supporting a club I only found because of you, and which I'd now be unable to leave even if I wanted to.

And thank you for being, through all of it, slightly ridiculous. The celebrations. The posing. The complete absence of modesty. You were never cool and you never once pretended to be, and that made it possible for the rest of us to take you seriously.

Portugal will find somebody faster. Every country eventually does.

But it will be a long time before they find anybody who stands for the anthem like that — and much longer before they find anybody who makes an ordinary man in another country believe that the distance between here and there is just work, done daily, for longer than seems reasonable.

You're not finished. I know. There's still a season in you and I'll be watching it.

But that shirt is done, and it deserved something said about it.

Obrigado, CR7.

…Tune in for next.