Cristiano Ronaldo ready to see off Lamine Yamal in battle of the ages

There is no shortage of ways to illustrate the longevity of Cristiano Ronaldo. It’s quite a fun game, in fact: Cristiano Ronaldo’s international debut predates the invention of YouTube. He signed for Manchester United in a world that did not contain Facebook. The man with more followers than anyone on Instagram moved to Real Madrid a year before that platform was launched.

Only rarely, though, is there a chance to illustrate not just the length of his career but the span of it. That requires not just a start point, a historical landmark against which he might be judged, but a modern milestone, too. For example: in his first major final – the culmination of the 2004 FA Cup – Ronaldo faced a Millwall team containing (and managed by) Dennis Wise. In his next major final, today’s conclusion of the Nations League in Munich, Ronaldo will face a Spain team inspired by Lamine Yamal.

Wise and Yamal could not belong to more different worlds. Wise made his debut in 1985. He was part of the Crazy Gang side that beat Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final. He played on through the early years of what we might recognise now as modern football, but even then he seemed redolent of an era that was starting to fade. He is still around, an executive at the ambitious Italian side Como, but his name feels like it belongs to an increasingly distant past.

Yamal, of course, is the opposite. At 17, he is the sport’s future. He became a European champion last summer. Beating Portugal on Sunday evening would make it two victories from two senior international competitions, and it would make Spain heavy favourites to record three from three at the World Cup next summer.

That Ronaldo can act as a bridge between the ages of Wise and Yamal is, in its own quiet way, astonishing. Wise is not the only essentially historical figure he faced early in his career. In his first season at Manchester United, he played against Alan Shearer, the podcaster, and Gareth Southgate and Denis Irwin.

All of those names seem distant, now; that he faced them all is somehow more striking than the raw numbers of his career. They tend to be just a little overpowering, almost incomprehensible without context: the 937 goals he has scored over the years, 137 of them for Portugal, the 220 international caps. The fact he once shared a pitch with Dion Dublin, now known to a generation largely as the presenter of Homes under the Hammer, somehow expresses it all much more eloquently.

More remarkable still, there is little sign of him stopping. There was a moment, in the 2022 World Cup, when Ronaldo’s race seemed to be run: he was dropped for Portugal’s last 16 game against Switzerland, having struggled to make any impact at all during the tournament’s group phase. His replacement, Gonçalo Ramos, required exactly 67 minutes to score a hat-trick.

It might have seemed, then, as though his subsequent move to Saudi Arabia was an admission that the twilight was coming. In the three years he has spent at Al Nassr, he has presented all of his achievements in the Roshn Pro League – the goals, the victories – with no less enthusiasm and ardour than had he been in the Premier League or La Liga; it has been hard, from afar, not to feel he might be protesting just a little too much.

That, clearly, is not the way Ronaldo sees it. As Roberto Martínez, the Portugal manager, said after his team had beaten Germany to reach the final of the Nations League, discussing when Ronaldo will draw the curtain on his career is “like talking about the weather, everyone has an opinion”. In reality, he said, nobody can be sure when the 40-year-old will retire. Not even Ronaldo, as far as Martínez can tell, has a clear plan.

Besides, it is not as though he no longer contributes. Ronaldo is not what he was, but he retains an ability to prove decisive. In Wednesday’s semi he tapped home Nuno Mendes’ cross for Portugal’s winner over Germany (they play France in the third-place play-off in Stuttgart); he will believe he can do the same against Spain tonight. He has shared a pitch with Shearer and Wise and Dublin; he has witnessed Facebook’s rise and fall. Yamal is not the first prodigy he has seen arrive, the first harbinger of a new age he has had to endure. None of it has stopped him yet. None of it has made him feel his age.

Photograph by Daniela Porcelli/Sports Press Photo/Getty