Monetizable egomania
Portugal's fiasco on its first 2026 World Cup match
In one of his brilliant football crónicas, Nelson Rodrigues says Brazilians are “Narcissus in reverse, spitting in their own image”. For a long time, Portugal was also like that. It was only due to our excess of modesty, in fact, that the Magriços national team lead by the dreamlike football of the mythical Eusébio failed to bring home the trophy from the 1966 World Cup, in England. (Well, maybe not only due to that; I’m told the referees also played a part…) Anyway, that sort of anti-vanity was part of us; we were simply build like that.
Decades go by and, suddenly, José Mourinho pops up on the world benches with his mindgames and his galactic contract compensations; on the world pitches, we get Cristiano Ronaldo with his selfie-football and brand-like personality. (In the opposite direction of AI avatars, the Madeira-born athlete has even changed his name for a bot-sounding, patentable acronym, CR7.) But it all went downhill. If these two figures’ project was to somehow calibrate Portugal’s proverbial excess of modesty, they made a gross miscalculation and fell on the other extreme. Or somewhere worse, I guess. If one looks at it carefully, what these two football big shots arrived at has nothing to do with pride or even vanity. It’s no more than a bitter, sad, monetizable egomania. A media exercise that relates to the true wonder of football like the current financial hypercapitalism relates to the art of, say, producing a real good shoe. And that shows on the pitch, of course. The ball senses everything; that wise round magical thing just knows. Money signs slide on the world screens while, on the green, green grass, football becomes depressingly square.
That is the context of last Wednesday’s match between Portugal and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s the context, but it serves also as the match synopsis, kind of. Portugal has one of its best teams ever (João Neves, Bernardo Silva, Vitinha, Bruno Fernandes, João Cancelo, Nuno Mendes, Rafael Leão, Gonçalo Ramos…) and, yet, Roberto Martínez, Portugal’s coach, puts CR7 in, leaves him there for the whole 90 minutes and, what’s worse, designs the team strategy with Cristiano and Cristiano’s records in mind. Against DR Congo, the amazing João Neves got a great header: 1-0. And then what? Well, then we went back to managing the void that Cristiano Ronaldo embodies. (Paraphrasing Nelson Rodrigues, Cristiano has become his own equestrian statue.)
This Wednesday at Houston stadium left us with a miserable draw and a very uninspiring horizon. The Portuguese football fan cannot help but feel — not unlike the common citizen in these times of oligopolies and populist corruption — that the system is rigged against him. Against his childish joy towards football, his mad love for the game. Against the Portuguese futebol bonito DNA and — if we insist mistaking this CR7 enterprise for our national team — against our pride, our self-esteem, our sanity.