Portugal 0-1 Spain: it's over, Ronaldo's World Cup ends, and I need to talk about Roberto Martínez

Ninety minutes and one second. That's when Mikel Merino slid the ball past Diogo Costa and ended it. Portugal 0, Spain 1. We're out of the World Cup, eliminated in the Round of 16 by our neighbours, and Cristiano Ronaldo's World Cup career — six tournaments, twenty years, all of it — comes to a close in Dallas without the trophy he chased his entire life.

I'm sad. Of course I'm sad. But more than sad, I'm frustrated. And not with the players. Not even, entirely, with Ronaldo. I'm frustrated with the man on the touchline, because tonight crystallized something I've been thinking for a long time and been too polite to say out loud.

I don't think Roberto Martínez is a good coach. There. I said it. Let me explain why.

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The game itself

First, let's be fair about the match, because context matters. Spain were the better team. They've been the best team in this tournament — the most complete, the most coherent, the most obviously coached-into-a-system side left in the competition. They finished with 1.77 expected goals to our 0.60. Fifteen shots to our ten. They became the first team in World Cup history to keep six consecutive clean sheets. They deserved to win.

And yet — and this is the maddening part — we were still in it. Right up until the 91st minute, it was 0-0 and heading for extra time. Diogo Costa was, once again, our best player, pulling off save after save (a stunning double stop from Yamal and Baena in the 16th minute chief among them). Nuno Mendes was brilliant before he limped off injured in the second half — he'd completely nullified Yamal, our best defender on the night. We even hit the crossbar through a deflected Mendes strike. We rode our luck, sure, but we were 90 seconds from taking Spain to extra time with a chance to nick it.

And then Ferran Torres — a substitute — turned on a pass and slipped in Mikel Merino — another substitute — who took his time and finished coolly into the bottom corner. De la Fuente's changes won the game. His subs decided it. Which brings me neatly to the problem.

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The De la Fuente contrast

Here's what happened tonight in a nutshell. The Spanish coach made substitutions that won the game. The Portuguese coach made substitutions — and selections — that lost it. On the very same night, on the very same pitch, you got a side-by-side comparison of good in-game management and bad in-game management. And Portugal were on the wrong side of it.

That's not bad luck. That's coaching. And it's a pattern with Martínez, not a one-off.

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Let's talk about his record, because it's not what people think

People treat Roberto Martínez like a serious, accomplished international manager. Let's actually look at what he's achieved with generational talent.

He had Belgium. Not just any Belgium — the golden generation of Belgium, in their absolute prime. De Bruyne, Hazard, Lukaku, Courtois, a squad ranked number one in the world for years. A group of players that comes along once in a nation's history. And what did he win with them? Nothing. Not a single trophy. A World Cup semi-final in 2018 and then a steady decline. He took the best collection of players Belgium will ever have and won zero tournaments. Zero.

Now he has Portugal. And again — this is arguably the best, deepest generation of Portuguese talent in at least fifty years. Bruno Fernandes, Bernardo Silva, Vitinha, João Neves, Rafael Leão, Nuno Mendes, Diogo Costa, Gonçalo Ramos, and yes, still, Cristiano Ronaldo. An embarrassment of riches. And what has he won? A Nations League. One Nations League. A competition that, let's be honest, sits some way below a Euro or a World Cup in prestige.

Two golden generations. Two of the most talented squads their respective countries have ever produced. And the sum total of Roberto Martínez's achievement with both is one Nations League. That's not the CV of a great coach. That's the CV of a man who keeps being handed Ferraris and returning them with scratches.

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The selection problem: no coherent criteria

But it's not just the trophy count. It's the decision-making. Because Martínez, for me, has never shown a coherent, defensible set of criteria for who plays and why. And tonight, plus the last few years, gave us the perfect examples.

Cast your mind back four years, to the last World Cup, when Portugal lost to Morocco. In that game — with Ronaldo still capable of changing a match, still able to produce a moment — Martínez (well, it was Santos then, but bear with me on the broader point about Portugal's management culture) left him on the bench. The reluctance to use him when he could still make a difference.

And now? Now Ronaldo is 41. He is, clearly and visibly, not the player he was. He spent most of tonight's game a passenger, drifting on the periphery, unable to influence the play the way he once could. He missed two decent chances. And Martínez left him on for the full ninety minutes. The full ninety. When it was obvious to everyone watching that the game was passing him by.

Think about the contradiction there. Four years ago, when Ronaldo could still do damage, the instinct was to bench him. Now, when he can't, the instinct is to play him the whole game. Where is the logic? Where is the criteria? And this is the same Martínez who, in the LAST game against Croatia, brought on Gonçalo Ramos — and Ramos scored the winner. He had direct, fresh evidence that changing things, that trusting the alternatives, works. And he ignored it against Spain.

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The Vitinha substitution that made no sense

And then there was the substitution that, honestly, might be the one that annoyed me most, because it wasn't emotional or sentimental — it was just tactically baffling.

Vitinha was one of our best players on the night. He was keeping the ball, dictating tempo, barely misplacing a pass. He was the guy making the team tick in midfield. And Martínez took him off.

Meanwhile, Bruno Fernandes — who, like Ronaldo, spent large parts of the game on the periphery, drifting in and out, not influencing things the way he can — stayed on. So the manager removed the midfielder who was playing well and kept on the one who wasn't. I genuinely sat there and asked out loud: what is the thinking? What is the plan? Because from the outside, there wasn't one. It was change for the sake of change, and it weakened the team at the exact moment we needed control.

You can forgive a lot in a manager. You can forgive losing to a better team. You can forgive tactical gambles that don't come off. What's harder to forgive is a persistent absence of clear, logical reasoning behind the biggest decisions. And with Martínez, game after game, that's what I see.

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Ronaldo deserves a proper farewell, though

Let me step away from the Martínez critique for a moment, because it would be wrong to let it overshadow the end of an era.

This was, by his own admission, Ronaldo's last World Cup. He said before the game it would be his final one. And so a career that began in Germany 2006 — when a baby-faced 21-year-old helped Portugal to fourth place — ends in Dallas in 2026, at 41 years old, with the man having become the first player in history to score at six different World Cups. Eleven World Cup goals. Twenty-five World Cup starts, second only to Messi. A record that will likely never be broken.

He never won the World Cup. It's the one prize that eluded him, the gap in an otherwise complete collection. And there's a real sadness in watching him walk off the biggest stage for the last time without it, cameras panning to his face, a banner in the crowd depicting him as a saint. Whatever frustrations I've had with how he's been used, the man is a titan of the game, the greatest goalscorer football has ever seen, and he gave Portugal two decades of moments we'll never forget.

He deserved a better send-off than a 91st-minute defeat. But football rarely gives its legends the endings they deserve.

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Where this leaves us

So Portugal are out, and the questions begin. The most important one, for me, is about the man in charge. Because this squad — THIS squad, with this talent — should be doing better than a Round of 16 exit. And when a manager has now underdelivered with two separate golden generations, at some point you have to stop blaming circumstance and start looking at the common denominator.

I want to be clear: I'm not saying the players are blameless. The failure to turn possession into goals, the inability to blend all that individual quality into a coherent team, has been the story of this tournament and it's a collective failure. But setting up the team, choosing who plays, managing the game, making the right changes at the right moments — that's the manager's job. And Roberto Martínez, for me, has not done that job well enough. Not tonight, and not for a while.

Portugal will host the next World Cup in 2030, alongside Spain and Morocco. There's a young core here — Neves, Vitinha, Leão, Nuno Mendes — that can absolutely compete for that. But they need a coach who can mould them into a team, who has a plan, who has criteria, who can make the substitution that wins a game rather than the one that loses it.

Whether that coach is Roberto Martínez, I have my doubts. Serious ones. Tonight only deepened them.

Obrigado, Cristiano. For everything. And to the rest — we go again. We always go again. But something needs to change, and I think we all know where it starts.