To begin, a couple of small trigger warnings. First off, this article will be polluted with the greatness of Cristiano Ronaldo. To read it will be to spend some time mired in his excellence, like wading through a particularly squelchy bog of pure, uncut CR7ness. This might not seem like your idea of fun at the best of times, never mind on a weekend when his guns are trained on the Ireland soccer team.
Across his career, we have tended to be a flat track for him to bully. It’s 20 years since his first game against Ireland and though it ended with a 1-0 win for Brian Kerr’s side at Lansdowne Road – a shiny penny if you were able to conjure up dear old Andy O’Brien as the goalscorer on the night – Ronaldo has taken plenty of revenge in the two decades since.
It presumably won’t mean much to him but his record against Ireland is much better than his peers. Over the years, our history against what might be termed the global icons of the game hasn’t been too bad, all told. Messi, Ronaldinho, the original Ronaldo, Zidane, Baggio – they’ve all come and gone in games against Ireland without scoring a goal. Not so Cristiano.
Ireland have faced 35 players down through the decades who have either won the Ballon d’Or or have gone on to win it. None of them have played against us more times than Ronaldo (five) or scored more against us than Ronaldo (four). Ruud Gullit scored four in four games, Michel Platini scored three in four. Nobody has filled his boots quite like Ronaldo.
READ MORE
Which brings us to the second trigger warning. The piece will contain quite an amount of numbers. It will be positively festooned with numbers of goals, numbers of appearances, numbers of countries and players and games and everything else. Usually, in an attempt to keep the reader’s eyes from going square, the smart thing to do is to try to keep the numbers as decoration. The sprinkles on the top of the cake. That’s going to be difficult this time around.
That’s because this piece deals specifically with Ronaldo’s international career. Forget for a moment about Real Madrid or Man United or the crowd out in Saudi. This is about what he’s done on a Portugal shirt, what he is still doing at the age of 40. And in that context, the numbers aren’t the sprinkles. They’re the cake.
Over the past 22 years and 52 days, you can argue that there have been better footballers than Ronaldo or that there have been more likeable players or even that the list of names who’ve done the needful for their country at the most crucial moments ought not to include him. But you can’t argue with the numbers. They are completely extraordinary.
Let’s start with caps. He has more of them than any other male footballer in the history of the game – Saturday night in Lisbon will be his 224th international appearance. The only other man to pass 200 games for his country is the former Kuwaiti player Bader al-Mutawa, who retired in 2022 after 202 matches. Even then, Fifa only recognise 196 of those as official caps – some matches were in the Arab Games, against under-23 teams.
One way or another, Ronaldo is out on his own with clear water behind him. Lionel Messi has 194 caps for Argentina and may or may not play in next year’s World Cup. Luka Modric is still wizarding away for Croatia and made his 191st appearance on Thursday night against the Czech Republic. The Qatari player Hasan Al-Hoydos is next on the active list with 184 caps but didn’t get off the bench against Oman on Wednesday.
Ronaldo, meanwhile, has started 18 out of Portugal’s last 20 games, including all their matches this year. The game against Ireland will be Portugal’s seventh of 2025 – the only outfield players to start all of the previous six are Ronaldo, Bruno Fernandes, Ruben Dias and Nuno Mendes. There is no sign of him stopping or even slowing up. He will presumably keep going until the World Cup at least.
Wherever his caps number ends up, it could stand alone for decades. Of the other active players who have passed 100 international games, Chile’s Alexis Sanchez (168) is about to turn 37. Granit Xhaka (139) is a sprightly 33 but he’d need to put in another decade for Switzerland to get anywhere close.
Think of it this way. To catch Ronaldo’s record, it would need someone such as Lamine Yamal, who already has 23 caps at the ludicrously young age of 18, to play 10 games a year for Spain every year until 2045. Ronaldo will be in his 60s by then.
These are insane numbers. And yet they’re not even the most impressive figures attached to Ronaldo’s international career. It’s one thing to play all those games, quite another to score so many goals along the way. The hardest thing in football is still the hardest thing in football. And nobody has done it more often than Ronaldo. It’s likely nobody ever will.
Ronaldo has 141 international goals. only two other men in history have passed 100 – Messi (114) and the great Iranian Ali Daei (108). Ronaldo was 35 when he scored his 100th goal, in September 2020.
He has upped his scoring rate in the five years since – 41 goals in 58 games. Go back a couple of generations and Marco van Basten played 58 matches for the Netherlands, scoring 24 goals. Van Basten was one of the all-time greats and yet by the numbers, Ronaldo’s late 30s knocks him into a cocked hat.
You want more comparisons? Erling Haaland has had an incredible start to his Norway career, with 48 goals in 45 games. If Ronaldo never scores another goal, Haaland will need another 93 to catch him. Only four men have ever scored more than 90 goals for their country and now Haaland needs to match them on top of what he’s already done to even be in the conversation.
Or take someone such as Neymar, the all-time leading scorer for Brazil. Neymar is 10th on the all-time list on 79 goals. Which sounds impressive until you work out that it means Ronaldo is as far ahead of Neymar as Neymar is ahead of Shane Long. That’s not a dig at the Tipperary man, whose 17 goals in a green shirt put him seventh on the all-time Ireland list. It’s just to illustrate how galactically unique Ronaldo is, alone among everyone who has ever scored an international goal.
[ Cristiano Ronaldo becomes first footballer to join the billionaire clubOpens in new window ]
Annoying, vain and with an ego the size of Jupiter, Ronaldo has always been a hard act to love. But in the history of international football, there has never been a more devastating, enduring piece of weaponry.
On that at least, the numbers are very clear.
Ballon d’Or winners who have played against Ireland
5 games – Cristiano Ronaldo, Oleg Blokhin
4 – Pavel Nedved, Luis Figo, Ruud Gullit, Michel Platini
3 – Zinedine Zidane, Marco van Basten, Kevin Keegan
2 – Ousmane Dembélé, Luka Modric, Kaka, Fabio Cannavaro, Roberto Baggio, Igor Belanov, Franz Beckenbauer, Josef Masopust, Luis Suarez, Raymond Kopa
1 – Lionel Messi, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Matthias Sammer, Hristo Stoichkov, Jean-Pierre Papin, Lothar Matthaeus, Paulo Rossi, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Allan Simonsen, Gerd Müller, Florian Albert, Bobby Charlton, Eusébio, Denis Law, Stanley Matthews
Ballon d’Or winners who have scored against Ireland
4 goals – Cristiano Ronaldo, Gullit
3 – Platini
2 – Keegan
1 – Figo, Van Basten, Rossi, Rummenigge, Beckenbauer, Blokhin
