Cristiano Ronaldo at Euro 2024: What should we expect from Portugal’s go-to man?

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An incredible 20 years after making his competition debut, Cristiano Ronaldo will be one of the star attractions once again at this summer’s European Championship in Germany.

It will be his sixth Euros with Portugal, who continue to look to their all-time top scorer and most-capped player to convert the chances they create. Ronaldo started nine of their 10 qualifying matches for the tournament and scored 10 goals, ranking behind only Bruno Fernandes and Ruben Dias for minutes played in Roberto Martinez’s talented squad. He also scored twice on Tuesday in a friendly against Republic of Ireland.

“We don’t make choices based on where the players play,” Martinez said in May when asked about Ronaldo’s enduring prominence for Portugal. It is just as well because the 39-year-old has faded a little from the mainstream football consciousness since leaving Manchester United in a storm of acrimony in November 2022 and making a hugely lucrative move to Saudi Arabia with Al Nassr the following January.

Ronaldo remains one of the most famous athletes on the planet — and the highest-earning one according to Forbes in 2024 — but relatively few football fans watch him play on a weekly basis in the Saudi Pro League. His headline numbers there are typically eye-catching: 50 goals across all competitions for Al Nassr in 2023-24 and 35 in the league, comfortably enough to make him the first player to win a Golden Boot award in four different countries.

But just how good is the version of Ronaldo that we will see in action in Germany? Let’s take a closer look.

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Ronaldo’s achievements in Saudi Arabia last season need to be considered within their proper context.

According to Opta’s most recent power rankings, the Saudi Pro League is the 27th-strongest league in the world — placing it just below South Korea’s K League 1 and just above the Israeli Premier League.

Al Hilal, undefeated Saudi Pro League champions in 2023-24, are ranked by Opta as the 39th-best club side in the world. They finished 14 points clear of second-placed Al Nassr, who are ranked the 88th-best club side in the world. The next-best Saudi Pro League club, Al Taawoun, are 300th on the list, so it should not be particularly surprising that the division’s two top teams scored 101 and 100 goals respectively in their 34 league matches.

Saudi Pro League clubs are only allowed to register a total of eight foreign players over the course of the season and the majority of the high-profile imports skew towards the midfield and attacking positions. Aside from Kalidou Koulibaly at Al Hilal, the best defender lured to Saudi Arabia in the last year is Aymeric Laporte, Ronaldo’s team-mate at Al Nassr.

None of this is intended to discredit entirely Ronaldo’s spectacular re-emergence as the most prolific goalscorer in world football in his late thirties. It is simply to note that he thrived in a pretty accommodating defensive environment in 2023-24 — the kind of environment where relatively unforced errors are much more common than in the top flights of England, Italy or Spain.

Examples include this disastrous back-header, which created a tap-in against Al Wehda in November…

… and the statuesque possession from Al Okhdood in May that allowed Al Nassr midfielder Ali Al-Hassan to win the ball in the opposition penalty area and fire in a cutback that hit Ronaldo on the shins and went in:

With all that said, this significant step down in competition level has allowed Ronaldo to return to a form more recognisable to those who watched him earlier in his thirties at Real Madrid and Juventus, rather than the declining figure he appeared to be towards the end of his second spell at Manchester United.

One of the keys to Ronaldo becoming one of the greatest high-volume goalscorers in football history was his success in becoming a high-volume shooter. In the Saudi Pro League, he is a shot monster again: 6.2 attempts per 90 minutes in 2023-24 according to Fbref.com, which is broadly in line with his final three seasons in Madrid and his three full campaigns at Juventus:

To put that particular number into context, Darwin Nunez and Kylian Mbappe led Europe’s big five leagues with 4.7 shot attempts per 90 minutes in 2023-24.

While that spectacularly gluttonous shot diet contains a few customary speculative efforts, Ronaldo’s greatness as a goalscorer is his ability to maintain a good level of efficiency on a large number of attempts. Never missing from the penalty spot helps — he is 13 from 13 since arriving in the Saudi Pro League, with eight of those spot kicks converted last season — but his 27 non-penalty goals came from chances worth 24.4 non-penalty expected goals (npxG).

Ronaldo’s 0.83 npxG per 90 minutes is in line with his final season at Real Madrid in 2017-18 (0.87). Saudi Pro League defences are nothing like as challenging as the opposing back lines he tormented in La Liga seven years ago, but that number does underline his enduring ability to get himself into scoring positions with exceptional regularity.

Very much a centre-forward for AlvNassr with minimal pressing or defensive responsibilities, Ronaldo is free to expend all his mental and physical energy in the final third. Entire sequences of possession can play out with him a relatively static presence in the No 9 position, but the moment he senses an opportunity, he still has the instincts and the timing to create crucial separation from defenders.

The first of his three goals against Al Ta’ee in March is the result of a sudden dash towards a pocket of space in front of the near post as Sadio Mane sizes up his options from a short corner, followed by a sharp low first-time finish from the Senegal international’s low cutback:

For the third of his goals in the same game, Ronaldo watches play develop around him while standing in an offside position as Mane passes the ball out to the right flank. Only when the cross is imminent does he make a sudden move, darting to the back post where his legs are still springy enough to ensure he meets a hanging cross with a downward header into the net:

Another thing that has always distinguished Ronaldo’s scoring threat is how willing and dangerous he is shooting with his supposedly weaker left foot. When he pulls his right foot back on the edge of the box in the sequence below, Al Ahli’s defenders have every right to expect a shot. Instead, he chops the ball sharply onto his left before curling a low shot beyond Edouard Mendy and into the corner:

In the semi-final of the King’s Cup against Al Khaleej last month, Ronaldo scored arguably his best goal of the season with his left foot, chasing down a scuffed clearance by goalkeeper Ibrahim Sehic in the penalty area and looping the ball into the net with a spinning half-volley that showcased supreme muscle strength and technique:

The most encouraging aspect of Ronaldo’s form ahead of Euro 2024 is that it carried over pretty seamlessly to Portugal’s dominant qualifying run. He took 46 shots and scored with 10 of his 19 attempts on target; Belgium striker Romelu Lukaku was the only player to find the net more often (14 times) in qualifying.

It is arguable whether Portugal’s opponents — Slovakia, Luxembourg, Iceland, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Liechtenstein — were any more daunting than Ronaldo’s weekly assignments in the Saudi Pro League, but many of the same attacking movements that have powered the second half of his illustrious career worked to good effect.

Here, against Liechtenstein, he races onto a Diogo Jota pass but, rather than looking to set up an opportunity to check back as most right-footers would, he instead pushes the ball confidently ahead of his left foot before ripping a fierce shot past the goalkeeper and high into the net:

This goal against Slovakia in October resembles several of his strikes for Al Nassr in 2023-24: static until the ball goes wide, then timing a run to meet an inviting low Bruno Fernandes cross for a tap-in at the back post:

His body might not be quite as explosive as it once was, but Ronaldo’s mind is as sharp as ever in the final third and his relentless determination to score is undimmed by age.

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One of the defining images of the 2022 World Cup is Ronaldo crying in the tunnel after Portugal’s quarter-final loss to Morocco.

Displaced in the starting XI by Goncalo Ramos, he had been reduced to a watching brief for the first 51 minutes and unable to affect proceedings after his introduction. It seemed like his last chance had gone and the torch had been passed on.

Yet two years on, here we are. Ronaldo has re-asserted himself as indispensable to Fernando Santos’ successor Martinez while Ramos has stagnated following a big-money move from Benfica to Paris Saint-Germain. There is no credible alternative to be trusted with the chances this team generates. No one better qualified to turn superiority into goals.

Ronaldo will face a vastly better calibre of opponent at Euro 2024, though perhaps not immediately; in statistical terms, Portugal have the easiest group stage draw of all the top seeds, with all of their opponents — Czech Republic, Turkey and Georgia — outside the top 35 in FIFA’s world rankings.

It may not be until the knockout stage that the question of how good the 39-year-old Ronaldo still is can be definitively answered. In the meantime, no one would be surprised if he adds to his record tally of 14 European Championship goals.

(Top photo: Eric Verhoeven/Soccrates/Getty Images)