Four years apart, two Portugal coaches left Cristiano Ronaldo on the bench, and both times the same striker stepped in and scored. What changed this week was not the answer on the pitch but the captain’s response to it. The angle comes from Sunday’s match report from Oslo, where Gonçalo Ramos started in Ronaldo’s place.
Updated 2 October 2026 with Portugal’s 4-2 win over Denmark.
Gonçalo Ramos has now settled the same argument twice. In December 2022, at the World Cup in Qatar, Fernando Santos left Ronaldo out of the starting line-up for a last-16 tie against Switzerland, and Ramos, picked in his place, scored a hat-trick in a 6-1 win. In Oslo last Sunday, Jorge Jesus made the same call, and Ramos started instead of Ronaldo and scored the winner in a 2-1 victory over Norway, chipping the ball into an empty net after the Norwegian goalkeeper passed it straight to him. Two coaches, four years and one striker, and the same answer to a question Portuguese football has spent half a decade reluctant to ask out loud.
What changed is the response. In Qatar, the federation was obliged to deny reports that Ronaldo had threatened to leave the squad, and he stayed. This week he left. On Wednesday, Jesus said Ronaldo would not start against Denmark either. Ronaldo had arrived at Parken on the team bus, but he did not join his teammates on the pitch and left the stadium soon after the coach’s news conference. On Instagram he wrote that, following that news conference and a conversation with the federation president, “I have decided to leave the national team’s training camp”, and promised to explain his reasons to Portuguese fans in due course. According to Al Jazeera, it is the first time in 23 years with Portugal that he has walked out of a camp.
It is worth being precise about what is known. Ronaldo has not said why he left beyond the sequence of events, and no retirement from international football has been announced. Jesus’s account is that he told Ronaldo before the Norway game that he would not start, but might come on late, and then decided as coach not to use him, insisting there was no incident. Portugal’s own framing on Sunday was workload: the coach is managing his minutes across an expanded international break. And Jesus is no stranger to him. He coached Ronaldo at Al-Nassr, which makes him the manager who has seen the 41-year-old’s current body more closely than any of his predecessors. That is what separates this from Qatar. Santos made a selection call in a World Cup knockout game. Jesus is making one with more first-hand knowledge of the player than any Portugal coach before him.
The record behind the decision is extraordinary, which is precisely why it is so hard to make. Ronaldo holds Portugal’s records for appearances and goals, has 979 goals for club and country as of late September and is closing on a thousand. He also told Vogue in August that this is probably his last year of football. Sunday was the first time he had been named among Portugal’s substitutes since a Nations League game against Scotland in September 2024. For two years the question of whether to start him barely arose. It has now arisen twice in a week.
The context is the summer. Portugal’s World Cup ended with a tame last-16 defeat to Spain, in the tie we framed as a meeting of generations between Lamine Yamal and Ronaldo. Spain went on to the final and beat Argentina 1-0. The generation that knocked Portugal out is the one Portugal will have to beat in 2030, and the question Jesus is answering now is whether Portugal will be built to do it.
That is the real deadline. The 2030 World Cup will be staged in Morocco, Spain and Portugal, a home tournament for the country Ronaldo has defined for two decades. He will turn 45 that year. Every Portugal coach between now and then inherits the same choice Santos and Jesus faced, and the evidence from Lusail and Oslo is that the team has an answer when it is allowed to look for one. Whether the captain accepts that answer is a different matter, and not one any coach can settle with a team sheet.
Portugal went on without him. In Copenhagen on Thursday they beat Denmark 4-2, with João Cancelo, Ramos, Vitinha and João Félix scoring, and Ramos led the line in Ronaldo’s place while Rafael Leão wore the number seven shirt. Asked about his captain’s departure, Jesus was blunt: “It will never be any player that will change my ideas as coach”. Norway come to Portugal on Sunday. No result will close this. Ramos has now answered the question three times on the pitch. Ronaldo has promised to give his own answer off it, and until he does, Portugal will be playing with the most famous empty seat in international football.
Sources: Al Jazeera (with AFP and Reuters), Reuters (via Soccerway), Sofascore, ESPN, LiveNOW from FOX, Vogue (via Al Jazeera), Instagram, Malay Mail, The Express Tribune, FotMob.
