Mexico opener: Ronaldo struggles begin
Mexico face South Africa at the Azteca, and somewhere in a team hotel, Cristiano Ronaldo is staring at a ceiling he cannot sleep under.
The World Cup starts in eight hours. Mexico face South Africa at the Azteca, and somewhere in a team hotel, Cristiano Ronaldo is staring at a ceiling he cannot sleep under.
This is not the tournament Portugal planned. At thirty-nine, Ronaldo arrived carrying the weight of what might be his final World Cup — and the early signs suggest that weight is too heavy. Training footage leaked from their Texas base shows a player who looks every one of his years. The first touch that once caressed perfection now argues with the ball. The timing that made defenders look foolish now makes him look ordinary.
Roberto Martínez knows what everyone else can see but nobody wants to say: his captain might be the problem he cannot solve. Portugal's golden generation — Bruno Fernandes pulling strings, Rafael Leão cutting through defences like silk — find themselves slowing down to accommodate a legend who refuses to accept that legends end.
This expanded World Cup promised more magic, more stories, more moments that live forever. Forty-eight teams instead of thirty-two. A month of football spread across three nations. What it delivered instead is a tournament where politics crawled onto the pitch before the first whistle blew. Gianni Infantino cosying up to Trump while journalists sit in detention cells. Somali referees denied visas. Senegal's players treated like criminals at airports.
The beautiful game wearing an ugly suit.
But Mexico still take the field at 6pm local time, and when they do, something clean begins. The Azteca will fill with ninety thousand voices that remember 1986, that remember Maradona dancing through England's defence thirty metres from where tonight's match unfolds. The stadium knows what greatness looks like. It remembers what football can be when it stops thinking about everything except the ball.
Gilberto Mora will become the youngest player to feature at this World Cup if Mexico's eighteen-year-old gets minutes against South Africa. Only Pelé was younger when he lit up a World Cup stage. That comparison should terrify opponents — it certainly terrifies the Portuguese coaching staff trying to work out how to use their aging talisman.
The tournament everyone said would be too big, too commercial, too American, starts with Mexico at home. Which means it starts with passion, with noise, with the belief that football still matters more than the machinery built around it.
In eight hours, we discover if the beautiful game survived its own expansion — or if we spent two years building a stage for something smaller than we remembered.
