There is a World Cup record that has stood since 1970. Pelé played in four World Cups — 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970 — and won three of them, producing in the final appearance the football that stands as the definitive expression of what the tournament can mean when a player and a moment align correctly. For fifty-six years, four World Cups has been the significant number.
Cristiano Ronaldo played in four. Then he played in five. On the first of June, or thereabouts, when FIFA publishes the official squad lists, his name will be on Portugal’s submission for the sixth time. He will be forty-one years old when Portugal’s first match is played. He is the only player in history to score at five different World Cups. Whatever happens in this tournament, he will have played at six.
Roberto Martínez named the squad. Ronaldo is in it. The conversation this generates in the Portuguese press — in A Bola and Record and O Jogo, in the television debates that run until midnight on announcement days — contains everything: reverence and exhaustion, admiration and the frustration of people who have spent four years waiting for the squad to be built around Bernardo Silva and João Neves and Pedro Neto rather than around a player whose best football is now, depending on when you last watched him, either still absolutely present or filtered through a different context than the world’s best leagues demand.
The Group
Portugal are in Group K with Colombia, Uzbekistan and DR Congo. The headline of this group is the match against Colombia — a meeting between Cristiano Ronaldo at forty-one and James Rodriguez at thirty-four, both of them at the end of their international careers, both of them in squads where the younger generation is carrying more and more weight. Portugal should navigate this group. Colombia, as we’ll see in their own profile, bring Luis Díaz at Bayern Munich and an attack of real quality. Uzbekistan and DR Congo are nations for whom qualification is itself the achievement.
The Squad Beyond Ronaldo
The more interesting conversation about this Portugal squad involves the players who are not Ronaldo. Bernardo Silva, thirty-one, in the final season of his Manchester City career — one of the confirmed summer departures from the Etihad — arrives in the best physical and technical condition of his life, freed from the uncertainty that has followed his City tenure. His ability to operate across multiple positions in midfield and forward — to find the space between the lines, to combine quickly, to arrive late and score — gives Portugal a quality that doesn’t require Ronaldo to be the primary reference point.
João Neves, twenty, at PSG, is the most complete young midfielder to emerge from Portugal’s development system since Renato Sanches was generating headlines at eighteen. His season in Paris, under Luis Enrique’s demanding system, has confirmed that he is ready for the weight of international responsibility. His partnership with Vitinha — the PSG midfield double that plays together at club level and brings that coherence directly to the national team — gives Portugal a central midfield combination of unusual quality for a team at this stage of its development.
Rafael Leão, at AC Milan, provides the most dangerous option in behind the defensive line — his acceleration and his ability to carry the ball at pace in the final third make him the player that opposing defences most need to track. Pedro Neto, at Chelsea, operates similarly from the opposite flank.
João Félix — whose career since his record departure from Atlético Madrid has been circuitous (Chelsea, Barcelona, and now Al Nassr alongside Ronaldo) — returns to the international squad with the talent that has always been evident and the consistency that has always been the question. If Félix plays at ninety percent of his potential for five weeks, Portugal have a forward of exceptional quality behind Gonçalo Ramos. If he performs at the level he too often settles for, he is a substitute.
Gonçalo Ramos, at PSG, scored fourteen Champions League goals across the club’s run to the final this season. He is twenty-three. He is the centre-forward Portugal have needed for a decade — tall, quick, excellent with either foot, capable of pressing from the front and finishing in the positions that the system creates. He is also the player who is most directly in competition with Ronaldo for starting minutes, and the way Martínez manages that question will define the tournament’s early narrative for this squad.
The Ronaldo Question, Stated Plainly
Roberto Martínez has managed Ronaldo with considerable diplomatic skill since taking charge in 2023. He has balanced the player’s extraordinary competitive drive and his genuine ongoing contribution — Ronaldo is still, at Al Nassr, scoring regularly and remaining physically imposing — with the need to build a squad that can function without him as the primary reference.
The plain statement is: Portugal are a better team when their system is built around the movement of Leão and Ramos and Neves and Silva rather than around Ronaldo’s runs from a position slightly to the right of centre. Ronaldo, at forty-one, does not press from the front with the intensity that Ramos or Félix provide. He does not create the space with his movement that the Portugal system generates most efficiently when the centre-forward operates laterally across the box rather than occupying a fixed channel.
He does, however, still score goals. And he has, across five World Cups, demonstrated a competitive intelligence in tournament matches that is genuine rather than manufactured: the big-game mentality, the ability to produce the goal when the match is hanging on it, the authority that comes from being the most decorated player in the world’s most decorated squad.
Martínez’s challenge is to use Ronaldo in the way his current capabilities demand — possibly as a substitute in the group stage, possibly rotating with Ramos — without creating the impression that the squad’s most famous player is being managed down to a diminished role, which is a conversation that Ronaldo, in his entire career, has never handled quietly.
The Nations League Victory
Portugal won the UEFA Nations League in June 2025, defeating Spain 5-3 on penalties in the final in Munich after a 2-2 draw. It was Portugal’s second Nations League title and a statement of the squad’s quality across ninety minutes of competitive football against the Euro 2024 champions.
Diogo Costa, in goal, saved the decisive penalty from Álvaro Morata. Nuno Mendes won Player of the Finals. The victory confirmed that Portugal are not just a collection of individually talented players — they have, under Martínez, developed the collective identity that tournament football requires.
That Nations League form, combined with a qualifying campaign that Portugal topped comfortably, makes them one of the eight or ten most credible contenders in a wide-open field.
The Verdict
Portugal will get out of Group K with ease. The Colombia match will be the competitive test — a genuine game between two attacking squads with histories of producing open, ambitious football.
From the round of sixteen onward, the path becomes the question. If Portugal reach the quarter-finals, they will likely meet England or Germany. In either match, the combination of Bernardo Silva, João Neves and Leão gives Portugal a tactical flexibility that their opponents will struggle to contain.
The tournament will produce a conversation, at some point, about what happens if Ronaldo comes on and changes a game. History suggests it is possible. Physics suggests the margin between possible and unlikely is narrower at forty-one than at thirty-one. Both things are true simultaneously, and the tension between them is what makes Portugal fascinating to watch.
Ronaldo at his sixth World Cup. The football will settle the rest.