
NICK MILLER
It started with a fairly standard post-match interview.
After
Portugal’s 1-1 draw with DR Congo in their opening game of the World
Cup, midfielder Joao Neves was asked about Cristiano Ronaldo who, you
may have noticed, tends to dominate the debate around their fixtures.
A
journalist asked Neves: “This Portugal team is very collective. It’s
also Cristiano Ronaldo’s last World Cup. How do you manage all that —
having such a big star but also a strong team with numerous other big
players at this World Cup?”
And he responded: “We know what
Cristiano Ronaldo has done for our national team and for the world of
football. But at this moment I feel that for him, and for everyone, he’s
one of us, one more guy trying to help. He’s no different to the rest
of us and he will contribute like we all will.”
So far, so
unremarkable. Maybe, if Neves was speaking at a time other than about 20
minutes after a disappointing result in a World Cup, his head all over
the place and confronted with a scrum of microphone-waving journalist,
he might have worded his answer slightly differently, given how people
tend to react to anything involving Ronaldo.
But the intention was
pretty clear: Neves was saying that this is a team sport, Ronaldo is
part of the team and they will figure all of this out together, as a
team.
Enter the modern world. The interview was clipped up and
did the rounds on the internet, giving the impression that Neves had
said that Ronaldo was an ‘ordinary’ player. Stripped of context and
nuance, that was a red rag to some tediously familiar bulls.
As
anyone conversant with social media will tell you, this is where things
get sticky. Because there is a certain element of the online community
that cannot countenance anything approaching criticism of Ronaldo.
As
such, when a fairly standard post-match carousel of photos appeared on
Neves’s Instagram account, it was flooded with comments from Ronaldo’s
fanboys. They appeared on Bruno Fernandes and Vitinha’s accounts too. We
won’t recount them all here but the general theme was that Ronaldo
should be given his due respect, and that they should pass him the ball
more.
Things then took a further turn for the dystopian, when
Madalena Aragao, a Portuguese actress and Neves’s partner, posted a
picture of herself and Neves, which was also targeted by the same sort
of people. She was then forced to limit replies to her posts, but that
didn’t stop a fake quote attributed to her appearing on some other
accounts, which urged those Ronaldo fans to “tell your GOAT to retire”.
Regrettably,
that quote was briefly taken as real by Georgina Rodriguez, Ronaldo’s
partner. She posted a screenshot of it with the caption: ‘Wow! Look at
how the future generations are brought up!’ Luckily, she appeared to
realise fairly quickly that it was fake, and deleted her post.
It’s
quite difficult not to turn into a grumpy old man about all of this, to
decry the corrosive influence of social media and hark back to the good
old days before the internet, when players spent their times between
games playing board games and unhinged fans’ access to them was more
limited.

Ronaldo talks with Joao Neves after his goal against DR CongoLeslie Plaza Johnson/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
This
appears not to be the fault of anyone in the Portugal camp. A
misinterpretation/misrepresentation of a quote and a fake social media
post have combined to create a situation that, at best, will be a
distraction they don’t need. The official line will be that they don’t
let this stuff permeate the group, but these things have a way of
finding their way through even the fiercest deflector shields.
As
if Portugal didn’t have enough to be concerned about at this World Cup,
having started the tournament in disappointing fashion with questions
about the balance of their side, both internally and externally. You
hope that they are broadly insulated from it. You hope that the
companies they employ to manage their social media do their jobs and
keep the worst away from them.
Neves gave a standard answer in an
interview, and in reaction to an incorrect interpretation of it, he has
been subject to abuse. Aragao suffered an all-too-familiar situation,
also subject to abuse for existing as a woman on the internet.
Rodriguez
too, who was fooled briefly by a fake internet post, which it’s
difficult to criticise her too harshly for, given we don’t know what’s
real either: we have no idea how many of those accounts are actually
real people, whether they’re real comments representing real sentiment.
You
also have to have some sympathy for Ronaldo, whatever your opinions of
him are. He invites warranted criticism with some of his actions, but
here he has done nothing and has still ended up in the middle of
something unnecessary, a needless problem he now has to deal with.
Welcome to the 2026 World Cup, dystopian edition.
THE NEW YORK TIMES