🚨 Jude Bellingham idolised Messi, but he saw his Real Version on the pitch where he cheats and manipulates the Refs
Yamal was Raised in La Masia watching Messi everyday, but the moment he shared pitch with Ronaldo, he saw the Greatness
The New Gen knows the Real Goat 🐐
🚨 NEW: Mac Allister was literally covering his mouth in the middle of the fight so he could insult someone from Egypt, and VAR still didn’t step in to show him a red card.
🚨🗣️New: Pepe on the controversial officiating decisions in Egypt and Argentina game, Messi and Argentina are being favored:
“Today the whole world watched the same match.
Egypt scored a perfectly good goal, celebrated it, earned it, and then VAR suddenly turned into a time machine. They went so far back looking for a reason to disallow it that I thought they were reviewing the pyramids being built.
That is my first question.
If VAR can travel that far into the past to cancel Egypt’s goal, why could it not travel five seconds into the future when Egypt were screaming for penalties?
Funny, no? One team gets forensic investigation. The other gets silence.
Egypt were leading. Egypt were controlling the game. Egypt were making Argentina uncomfortable. Then came the intervention that changed everything.
The disallowed goal.
The moment that shifted the entire momentum of the match.
And after that? Two penalty appeals. Two. Not one. Two opportunities for the officials to show consistency.
Nothing. No urgency. No transparency. No explanation that convinced anybody.
Then Argentina go down the other end and score the winner.
Football is a game of moments. The referee’s team decided which moments deserved attention and which moments deserved to disappear.
People tell me Argentina showed champion mentality. I agree.
But champion mentality and controversial officiating are not mutually exclusive things, Both can exist at the same time. What I cannot accept is the inconsistency.
When Egypt scored, VAR searched every grain of sand in the desert looking for a foul.
When Egypt asked for penalties, suddenly everybody became blind. That is why the Egyptian bench exploded. That is why cards were flying everywhere. That is why millions of fans left the stadium angry instead of simply disappointed.
Because losing to Argentina is one thing. Feeling like the rules changed depending on who benefited is another.
And this is what football fans hate the most. Not defeat. Not mistakes. Selective scrutiny.
The feeling that one decision was examined with a microscope while another was viewed from outer space.
Maybe Argentina would still have won. Maybe they would not. We will never know. Because the game was not allowed to reach its natural conclusion.
Instead, Egypt leave the World Cup with questions.
Questions about the disallowed goal, Questions about the ignored penalty appeals, Questions about consistency, Questions about why VAR looked like a sword against one team and a shield for another.
And when football leaves people talking more about the officials than the players, that is not a victory for the sport.
That is a failure.
Today Egypt lost 3-2 on the scoreboard.
But the debate over what really happened will win headlines for much longer than Argentina’s comeback.”
🥺🚨 زين الدين زيدان يعلق على بكاء كريستيانو رونالدو بعد صافرة نهاية المباراة:
🗣️ «شعرتُ بألمٍ شديدٍ لرؤيته يبكي بعد صافرة النهاية. كان واضحًا أن الأمر لم يعد يتعلق به شخصيًا، بل ببلده. أي رجلٍ يُحب وطنه أكثر من نفسه لدرجة أنه لعب حتى سن الـ41 ليُحقق له هذا اللقب؟ حتى وإن لم يُحرزه.»
🗣️ «ومع ذلك، سيجد البعض أسبابًا لانتقاده. أتمنى فقط أن يُدرك كريستيانو أن الفوز بكأس العالم إنجازٌ عظيم، لكنه لا يُحدد عظمة لاعب كرة القدم.»
🗣️ «ما حققه في هذه الرياضة يتجاوز بكثير مجرد لقب واحد. أرقامه القياسية، وثبات مستواه، وعقليته، وكيف سعى جاهدًا لأكثر من عقدين... هذا شيءٌ قد لا تشهده كرة القدم مرة أخرى.»
🗣️ «كنت محظوظًا بما يكفي للفوز بـ كأس العالم، لكنني أستطيع القول بكل صدق أنني لم أصل قط إلى مستوى الثبات والاستمرارية الذي أظهره كريستيانو طوال مسيرته. قليلون هم اللاعبون الذين سيصلون إلى هذا المستوى.»
🗣️ «بعد سنوات، لن يتذكر الناس كريستيانو فقط بسبب الألقاب التي فاز بها أو لم يفز بها، بل سيتذكرونه لأنه غيّر معايير العظمة.»
🗣️ «بالنسبة لي، سيظل يُذكر دائمًا كواحد من أعظم لاعبي كرة القدم على مر التاريخ، ولن يغير أي شيء حدث اليوم من ذلك شيئًا.»
No tattoos, No smoking, No alcohol, Extremely disciplined, Blood donor, Built from nothing, Charity without noise, Global icon, Most Hated, Most criticised, Top at everything, Ageing but still at top, etc... etc...
We will love you forever @Cristiano
🚨Sir Alex Ferguson on Cristiano Ronaldo:
🗣️ “I hear people saying Cristiano needed to win the World Cup to complete his career. I don’t agree with that. Cristiano Ronaldo has spent more than two decades proving himself on every stage football has to offer. He’s won league titles in different countries, conquered Europe, broken records people thought would stand forever and completely transformed the mentality of the Portuguese national team. Before Cristiano, Portugal hoped to compete. With Cristiano, they expected to win. That’s the difference true greatness makes.
People forget that one tournament doesn’t define a footballer. If it did, we’d have to question the careers of many of the greatest players the game has ever seen. Cristiano doesn’t need a World Cup to validate what he’s has achieved because his legacy was secured a long time ago. The World Cup would simply have been another chapter. The real story is twenty years of relentless professionalism, unmatched ambition, sacrifice and an obsession with improving every single day. That’s what separates him from almost everyone else.
🇵🇹 Portugal had never won a single major trophy in its entire history… until a boy from Madeira, born on the 5th of February 1985, changed everything. When young players ask me what greatness looks like, I don’t point to medals first. I point to commitment. I point to sacrifice. I point to Cristiano Ronaldo. Because that’s what true greatness is.
My take on this whole Portugal generation:
It's all about timing in these things. Getting the right set of players, with the right star, managed by the right coach, at the right context. But things never truly aligned for us.
Ronaldo was sandwiched between 2 great generations. When he was too young to be the best, the team was great. When he was too old to do a carry job, the team was great. When he was in his prime, for over a decade, the team was mediocre.
We always believed we could win big tournaments because of Ronaldo, but it was sort of a blind hope. A team whose second most influential player is a Nani, a João Moutinho, or a Pepe at times, can't be a favorite to win a World Cup, or even a Euros. Ronaldo was playing at such a level, touching unprecedented levels of dominance in the Champions League, that it made us believe we could always win. But, again, it was blind hope. From 2008 until 2018, the rest of our squad didn't have enough talent or spark to be the favorites to win anything.
But the blind hope has a reason to it. A solid team who has the best player in the world has a better chance of winning than every very good team whose best player is not quite the best in the world. And that's what worries me about our next generation.
Most World Cup wins have been about a story that feels right, led by a historic player (Messi, Mbappe, Pele, Maradona, Ronaldo Nazario, Zidane…). Portugal had 6 attempts at writing that story, and we fumbled all of them, for different reasons. Sometimes we went with the wrong coach (2010, 2022, 2026), sometimes the team wasn't good enough (2014, 2018).
So now what for us?
When a team wins the World Cup without having a true star, it's always out of such collective superiority that the run just makes sense (Germany, Spain, Italy the most recent examples).
Still, these were stacked squads. Will we have a stacked squad in 2030? 2034? 2038? We can never be sure. Belgium doesn't seem like having another golden generation anytime soon, neither does Italy, neither does the Netherlands, even Germany's future looks uncertain… international football is unpredictable.
For this post-Ronaldo chapter, the coach will probably be Jorge Jesus (since Mourinho took the Madrid job). No stars, no media, no hype. Just a team trying to play good football. I'm more curious than excited. But I think we will keep on having some good moments. Our era as favorites is over, and we begin another era as dark horses.
Conclusion, on Ronaldo's era with Portugal:
It didn't feel like a bust, it didn't feel like a fumble. Sometimes it felt like we underachieved, but we had some really great moments. We are still without a World Cup, but we saw our country win thinhs for the first time ever, and the culture in Portuguese football was changed forever. 2016 was more than just a trophy, it was a statement of change.
We could have won a World Cup, in the end we didn't… maybe some day. Regardless, we saw history be made.
At least we can tell our grandchildren we witnessed this era.
🚨| BREAKING: Speed is HEARTBROKEN and in COMPLETE DISBELIEF as Portugal are ELIMINATED from the World Cup 💔🇵🇹
“I thought they were gonna win it all… I swear to God, wallahi… I prayed… my prayers weren’t answered”