Ali Thameem
It started with a 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 Neves 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.”
Maybe, if Neves was speaking at another time, he might have worded his answer slightly differently, given how people tend to react to anything involving Ronaldo. But it was Neves’ nation as much as it was Ronaldo’s, and given that it was about 20 minutes after a disappointing result in a World Cup, he answered it as any patriotic Portuguese might have.
But his intention was not to belittle or undermine Ronaldo. 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.
Context is social media’s kryptonite, and what replaces it is outrage of the worst kind. Because there is a certain element of the online community that cannot digest any 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. The general theme of the comments 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.
Online troll-storms like this can, and will, affect players’ mentality, and by extension, their performance on the field. W
We tend to forget there was a time before the internet, when players spent their days between games playing board games – When the noise of unhinged fans were limited to the stadiums.
As if Portugal didn’t have enough to be concerned about at this World Cup, having started the tournament in disappointment. You hope that they are insulated from the toxicity of such social media trolls.
Neves gave a standard answer in an interview, and in reaction to an incorrect interpretation of it, he has been subject to abuse. But 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, straight out of a Black Mirror episode.
