Roberto Martinez on why Portugal need Cristiano Ronaldo and how Diogo Jota is their ‘light’ at this World Cup
An exhibition is on at the headquarters of the Portuguese Football Federation. Grainy black-and-white film runs on a loop behind a backlit display case. It holds a crimson Eusebio jersey, his signature etched beneath the old hand-stitched national team crest. The footage is of Portugal at the 1966 World Cup. “They were called Os Magricos,” Roberto Martinez says. Heroes from a 16th-century poem. Knights summoned to England for vengeance. “I remember when I was at Goodison Park as a manager, there were iconic pictures of the game in which Eusebio scored four goals (against North Korea),” Martinez recalls. “He became a respected figure in the British game without being British, which is quite rare.”
Sixty years later, the team of ’66 still holds a vaunted place in the country’s imagination, as their run to the semi-finals remains Portugal’s best finish at a World Cup. “You want to draw back on these memories and see their values as something we need,” Martinez says.
Since becoming national team coach three and a half years ago, the Catalan has immersed himself in Portuguese history and football culture. He moved his family here, even though the rhythms of international football would have allowed him to carry on living in the north west of England. He has kept up his Portuguese lessons, despite showing an early command of the language.
It is the reverse experience of a Portuguese player. Twenty-one members of his 26-man squad play abroad. Almost all of them speak in tongues additional to their native ones. “It comes historically from the navigators,” Martinez says. Maritime explorers like Ferdinand Magellan and Vasco da Gama. “They went around the world and discovered the world. The Portuguese people are prepared to go abroad. Very rarely a young Portuguese player doesn’t speak Spanish and English. The mentality is open-minded.”
After Os Magricos, Portugal didn’t play at another World Cup for 20 years. They then failed to qualify in 1990, 1994 and 1998. Three in a row, like Italy today. But this is a nation of just 10.7million. Haiti, another World Cup participant, has a comparable population. Super cities such as Sao Paulo in Brazil are bigger. Looking at the trophies arranged in the foyer of the Portuguese Football Federation, particularly the 2016 European Championship, pairs of red and green ribbons still strewn from its arms, it beggars belief.
“Remember Portugal has been to seven consecutive World Cups, now nine in total, since Cristiano Ronaldo arrived in the national team,” Martinez says. “He’s given incredible continuity in qualifying for the big tournaments.”
Ronaldo with the Euro 2016 trophy after Portugal’s 1-0 win against France (Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)
We will, in good time, come to Ronaldo and his impact on the Portuguese game. For now, another thing catches my eye. On a pedestal at the foot of an impressive cantilevered helical staircase stands the ornate Taca de Portugal. In May, it was won by second-division Torreense for the first time in their 109-year history. By upsetting Sporting in the final, their coach, Luis Tralhao, and his players wrote one of the fairytales of the 2025-26 season. It is comparable to the FA Cup that Martinez won with Wigan Athletic, and serves as an allegory for Portugal’s national story; one about punching above its weight.
How do they do it? In explanation, Martinez pulls at a red thread and a green one. The former is coaching and instruction. “The coaching style of Portugal comes from the university,” Martinez says. He name-checks the work of an influential academic, Vitor Frade of the University of Porto, and the course he taught in tactical periodisation. Frade is the acorn from which the modern-day Portuguese coaching tree sprouted. Jose Mourinho, for instance, was Frade’s student. “Everything is very methodical,” Martinez says. “There is a real structure that helps a lot of footballers, but what they do really well is the equilibrium… that it’s the game that teaches the players, and the game needs to be a difficult game.”
This is the other strand: youth development, something Portugal arguably does better than anyone else in relative terms. “To be able to have national leagues at under-19 level, then you got the Youth League in Europe, then you got the Under-23 League of Revelation, then you got the B teams, and then you got the first team. What you see is a 16- or 17-year-old going through four phases until he gets the first team. So the players are ready when they get to the first team.”
It sounds simple, standard even, but it is not like this everywhere. “When we’re looking around Europe, it’s a very challenging time for a young player to make that jump from the academy to first-team football.
“In the British game, it’s very difficult to get a young player that is ready to win games in the first team. In Spain, they found that B teams help a lot to develop the player at almost a pre-senior level. In England, it was always that under-23s level and the reserve leagues. (They are) not competitive enough to prepare a player, so then everything comes down to the manager to select an individual loan period and the risk of (him) fitting in and the style that you want the player to develop… the risk of using the player correctly is huge.”
The innate intrepidness, the explorer gene, does the rest for the Portuguese. In English football, it is only a recent phenomenon for young players to broaden their horizons and go abroad early. In Portugal, it is expected. Take the under-17 team that were crowned world champions in Qatar last year. “They got eight players from Benfica,” Martinez says. “Clearly, eight players from one club, they’re not going to have time in the first team. It’s mathematically improbable, so the players need to leave. They need to go abroad.”
Portugal’s Under-17 team celebrate winning the World Cup last year (Jurij Kodrun/FIFA via Getty Images)
Some are so talented that the foreign giants will come calling even before they have made their debut for Benfica, Porto or Sporting. This was true in the past. Bernardo Silva, for instance, made one appearance for Benfica before being sold to Monaco. Vitinha was the same age, barely 20, when Porto got an offer from Wolverhampton Wanderers to take him on loan. They became Champions League winners at Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain.
When I visited Martinez, it was in the days leading up to the final of that competition in Budapest. Watching it at the Puskas Arena was, he conceded, “an anxious moment… because it is the last step of having the squad free of injuries to come to prepare.” Vitinha, Nuno Mendes and Joao Neves all started for PSG. Goncalo Ramos also replaced the Ballon d’Or winner Ousmane Dembele at the end of normal time and scored PSG’s first penalty in the shootout against Arsenal. Portugal’s influence on arguably the team of the decade, the back-to-back European champions, is, once again, disproportionate for a nation of its size.
Martinez speaking to The Athletic before the World Cup (Portuguese Football Federation)
Is this a source of confidence for Martinez going into the World Cup? “This is an incredible generation,” Martinez says. “We’ve been working now for three years, going through the qualification for the Euros, going out on penalties against France (in the quarter-finals) at the Euros, then to the most demanding Nations League ever with 10 games, (a set of) quarter-finals, playing in Germany against Germany (in the semis), something we didn’t do for many, many years. To beat them, and coming back from behind twice against Spain, and the first time we beat Spain in a final as Portugal… there are many aspects that have been part of this journey. It’s been an exciting process.”
It has not been without heartbreak and grief, though. One of the protagonists of Portugal’s Nations League triumph was Diogo Jota, who passed away alongside his brother in a tragic car accident last year. “Diogo is our light,” Martinez says. “Diogo is our reference of wanting to do or needing to do what his dream was, which was winning titles for Portugal, like he did winning the Nations League. He was a big part of what we built in the dressing room.
Diogo Jota before Euro 2024 (Aitor Alcalde/UEFA via Getty Images)
“He wanted to win the World Cup, so it becomes a bit of a responsibility, an example, because Diogo was the pure example of believing in whatever could be possible, always with that tenacity, always finding the answer in the right moment in the difficult moment in the game. The way that he found the way against Denmark in the quarter-finals was the difference in the Nations League campaign. So, for us, he’s become a real focus, and probably an extra bit of energy and light in those difficult moments that you have as a football team, as a national team, and we need to use his inspiration until the end because he’s part of us.”
Everyone has processed the trauma in their own way. Martinez wanted to give each player time and space to handle it. They then spoke about it as a group. He counts himself very lucky to have “an incredible dressing room”. It is full of leaders. Goalkeeper Diogo Costa is captain of Porto, Bruno Fernandes skippers Manchester United, Bernardo wore the armband for Manchester City in his final year at the Etihad. Ruben Dias could have done too.
On Fernandes’ season, Martinez says: “In the three years that I’ve been here in the national team, his consistency levels have been incredible. Everything that he does in the final third has been of the highest level. Now I’m delighted that he gets recognition, not just from the players, because that’s something that you can feel straight away in the PFA awards, but also from the writers and the Premier League in general. Obviously, breaking that record over one season to get 21 assists, knocking (off) Kevin De Bruyne and Thierry Henry, that’s creating a historic memory.”
Fernandes celebrates during a wonderful season at club level with Manchester United (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
As for Bernardo and his role on the team, “it’s that intelligence,” Martinez says. “Bernardo is such an important player at the international level, because you can use him in different positions, he understands the moment of the game, the relationship between space and time, and he executes everything at perfection with his technical ability.”
Martinez thinks this makes his dressing room “unique” as it has “got a mixture of four or five different generations. Probably the new player arriving in the national team was born the year the captain made his debut for the national team.” In fact, Neves was born in September 2004, a full year after Luiz Felipe Scolari brought on an 18-year-old Ronaldo against Kazakhstan to collect the first of his 227 caps.
Now 41, Ronaldo has just won his first Saudi Pro League title. It only took him four years. He moved to Al Nassr after the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Many thought it would be his last, not least because, after failing to score from open play in the group stage, Martinez’s predecessor, Fernando Santos, left him out of the starting XI for Portugal’s first knockout game against Switzerland. His replacement, Goncalo Ramos, scored a hat-trick in a 6-1 win. It looked like the end of an era.
Ronaldo reacts after Portugal are eliminated from the 2022 World Cup (Manan Vatsyanana/AFP via Getty Images)
Reports of it proved premature. Ronaldo scored in the semi-finals and the final of the Nations League to win his third trophy with Portugal. He wasn’t as prolific in qualifying for the World Cup as Erling Haaland. But he still banged in five goals in five appearances. More would perhaps have followed if he had not got himself sent off in the 2-0 defeat to the Republic of Ireland last November. A measure of how badly FIFA appeared to want him at the World Cup was provided by the controversial decision to then suspend the final two games of his three-match ban for a year, meaning he’ll be available for Portugal’s opener against DR Congo in Houston on June 17.
Contrary to some online sentiment, Martinez still fervently believes Portugal are closer to starting a goal up than a man down when playing Ronaldo. “Here we get to have a wonderful conversation when we speak about the iconic figure of Cristiano Ronaldo,” he says. “A unique footballer that has changed the game. His commitment to the game is still an example for many young players. Twenty-one years of service to the national team, 227 games for the national team. No other player has done that. The number of goals. All those figures make Cristiano Ronaldo iconic.”
Ramos aside, Portugal has not produced a striker capable of succeeding Ronaldo. At the Euros two years ago, the Turkey game was interrupted by one pitch invader after another trying to get a selfie with him. He did not score from open play in that tournament but Martinez still believes Ronaldo poses the threat of old. “The influence of Cristiano Ronaldo as a No 9, the movement, the timing of the movement, the finishing, the way he opens spaces, the way that he can influence the defensive back line of the opposition, that’s a big, big strength.”
When Ronaldo flies into the Cidade do Futebol to meet up with the national team, Martinez claims: “His attitude is as fresh as an 18-year-old that’s playing for the national team for the first time.” A record sixth World Cup should, theoretically, be Ronaldo’s last, but it’s worth noting the next one in 2030 will be co-hosted by Portugal. Might Ronaldo carry on beyond scoring 1,000 goals and try to be involved at 45?
If not, what will Portuguese football look like after Ronaldo? “Cristiano cannot be replaced,” Martinez says. “Like for like, it’s impossible. But like anything, you need to find solutions, and you need to find different ways that you can to have an attacking team that can produce the same number of goals. Cristiano’s numbers cannot be replicated by an individual substitution, it is impossible.”
Cristiano Ronaldo lines up a free kick for Portugal during a warm-up match for this summer’s tournament (Sergio Mendes/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
His son, Cristiano Junior, will no doubt aspire to offer just that for Portugal. He scored twice for the under-16s against Greece in May. Who knows? Maybe one day they’ll play together for the national team.
In the meantime, there is a World Cup to win and Os Magricos to surpass. A final would be uncharted waters. But for a nation of navigators, there is no course a team this talented cannot plot.
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