After 23 years, 236 appearances and 146 goals, Cristiano Ronaldo the Portugal player is no more. International retirement has finally come for the superstar who it seemed could carry on forever.

Ronaldo has changed the landscape of international soccer, putting Portugal—already a strong soccer nation—more on the map than ever before. His tallies for both national team appearances and goals are world records in the men’s game and he has guided Portugal to not only its first ever major trophy, but three triumphs.

Still, this is a figure who has proven divisive over the past two decades, lacking the universal affection reserved for his greatest peer, Lionel Messi, and Ronaldo’s career has not been free of controversy.

These are the five biggest controversies of his Portugal career.

2006 World Cup Wink

Ronaldo was catching fire in the summer of 2006, but his behavior towards England’s Wayne Rooney—someone he called a teammate at club level with Manchester United—cost him the Best Young Player award at the World Cup.

His rushing of the referee after an altercation between Rooney and Portugal defender Ricardo Carvalho was followed by a wink in the direction of the Portuguese bench that has become an infamous part of World Cup history.

Chances are, Rooney would have been ejected from the quarterfinal for a frustrated stamp on Carvalho regardless of Ronaldo’s intervention, but FIFA’s Technical Study Group, tasked with deciding the award winners, didn’t like what it saw.

“We want to have decent behaviour and I admit we were critical of this,” said Holger Osieck, the head of the group. Similar, Germany legend Lothar Matthäus added: “Cristiano, he was obviously doing something here. He may have accumulated a couple of minus points due to his gesture with Rooney but you sometimes forget what the laws are in the heat of the fight.”

Fortunately for Manchester United, there was no lingering bad blood between the young superstars and the next three seasons delivered three Premier League titles and the Champions League, with Ronaldo and Rooney at the forefront of that success.

Captain’s Armband Thrown to the Floor

A lot of the rhetoric in the buildup to Ronaldo’s international retirement centers on respect, or the perceived lack of it towards him for everything he has achieved for his country.

But this is a two-way street and he was guilty of disrespecting his national team in a very aggressive way towards the end of 2–2 draw with Serbia in March 2021.

Ronaldo believed he had scored a stoppage-time winner in the 2022 World Cup qualifier in Belgrade, only to be told by the officials that the ball had not crossed the goal line—there was no goal-line technology in use during the match. He was yellow carded for his protests in the moment, before storming off as soon as the final whistle sounded.

In among that display of petulance and frustration, Ronaldo ripped off his captain’s armband and threw it to the floor. “Nobody will say now that his reaction was beautiful,” Portugal manager Fernando Santos admitted, but ultimately vowed to keep his captain in that role.

“Cristiano is a national example … he will keep the armband … forever.”

Some good did come out of the incident, though. The armband was retrieved from the field by a duty firefighter and was sold the following month in an auction raising money for a six-month old baby’s medical care. The winning bid was around $75,000.

Dropped During 2022 World Cup

Ronaldo went into the 2022 World Cup in Qatar in a difficult moment. His second spell with Manchester United had reached an acrimonious end, leading to his contract being terminated two days before the tournament, and he’d only scored twice in nine internationals leading up to the World Cup. His decline at tournament level was setting in.

Ronaldo converted a penalty in Portugal’s opening match against Ghana, making him the first male player to score at five World Cups, but that was where the high abruptly stopped. Blanks against Uruguay and South Korea in what followed of the group stage led to a very different role.

Fernando Santos “really did not like” the way an ineffective Ronaldo reacted when substituted in the latter match. The player later said it was directed at an opponent, but Santos still benched his underperforming superstar for the round of 16 against Switzerland. It was the first time Ronaldo hadn’t started for Portugal at a major tournament since being rested for a dead-rubber match in the group stage at Euro 2008, more than 14 years earlier.

To make matters worse for Ronaldo, Santos was vindicated for his courage, because replacement striker Gonçalo Ramos scored a hat trick as Portugal advanced.

He then remained on the bench for the quarterfinal against Morocco, and was powerless to prevent Portugal’s elimination after playing most of the second half. Santos was fired for the shock defeat to a perceived underdog and Ronaldo was restored at the earliest opportunity.

2026 World Cup Suspension Squashed

A red card, the first of his international career, against the Republic of Ireland in a 2026 World Cup qualifier could, and probably should, have seen Ronaldo miss some of the final tournament while serving a suspension. The five-time Ballon d’Or was guilty of swinging an elbow at Irish defender Dara O’Shea in Portugal’s penultimate qualifier in November 2025. He wasn’t initially punished with ejection from the match, but a review by VAR paved the way for a dismissal.

Violent offenses usually carry a three-match ban. But Article 27 of the FIFA Disciplinary Code—the exact same which caused such controversy at the World Cup when Donald Trump requested that Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension be reconsidered—was used to suspend the second and third games of the ban. FIFA has since set in motion a change to the rules.

Bans carry over from qualifiers into tournaments. But, with Ronaldo serving the first match in Portugal’s final qualifier, he was then free to play in the World Cup from the very start, rather than miss the first two games.

2026 Walkout

Plenty were surprised when Ronaldo decided to continue his Portugal career after the 2026 World Cup, rather than bow out at the end of a natural tournament cycle. He had considered it but was persuaded to keep going by Portuguese soccer federation president Pedro Proença.

It might have been better had he not. Instead of Ronaldo’s last Portugal match taking place at a World Cup—albeit in a defeat to eventual champion Spain—it wound up being a drab, forgettable victory over Wales in the UEFA Nations League group stage.

Ronaldo played 67 minutes of that match, struggling to make an impact in the same way he stunk up the place against DR Congo at the World Cup a few months earlier. He then spectacularly fell out with Jorge Jesus after accusing the manager of an “absolute breach of trust” by not playing him off the bench in the subsequent encounter with Norway.

Ronaldo traveled on with the team to its next base in Sweden, ahead of facing Denmark across the Øresund Bridge, but wound up leaving camp altogether after failing to patch things up. He welcomed the subsequent punishment, which proved to be rather pointless, and vowed not to retire but now has done anyway.