Portugal’s football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo has been cleared to play the opening matches of the 2026 World Cup in the United States after being handed a suspended sentence by FIFA for his red card against the Republic of Ireland.
Despite receiving a three-game ban, FIFA has decided to suspend the last two matches under a year’s probation. Considering that he has already served the first match of the suspension, Ronaldo will be available for Portugal’s opening matches of the upcoming World Cup.
While Portugal coach Roberto Martínez will certainly be delighted to have his captain and main star available, the decision has been widely lambasted as an example of favouritism in football.
Speaking on talkSPORT, former England international Darren Bent questioned why Ronaldo received a suspended ban while Argentina’s Nicolás Otamendi and Ecuador’s Moisés Caicedo must each sit out a match. For him, the difference is impossible to justify.
“It’s absolutely disgusting,” Bent and host Andy Goldstein exclaimed.
“What I think about FIFA is you just can’t trust them,” Bent continued. “You know full well that if that had been the case with Messi, they’d have done the same for him.”
He then pointed directly to Ronaldo’s recent appearance at a White House dinner hosted by US President Donald Trump, where he was photographed with FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
Strong criticism has also been directed at FIFA in an opinion piece by The Telegraph sports reporter Jamie Braidwood.
“Arrive for dinner, stay for seconds: to the surprise of absolutely no one, Cristiano Ronaldo has been cleared to start in Portugal’s opening match of the World Cup after Fifa’s disciplinary committee ruled to suspend the final two games of his three-game ban,” the reporter writes.
“No doubt to the delight of Donald Trump, Ronaldo has been granted a reprieve from the threat of starting the World Cup on the sidelines, following his red card for violent conduct against the Republic of Ireland earlier this month.
“Six days after dining at the White House as a guest of the US president, and as an envoy of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Ronaldo has received a ruling that, surely, no other player at next summer’s World Cup could expect to receive in the same situation.
His damning view of the situation condemns what he sees as FIFA’s blatant decision-making to favour perhaps the sport’s biggest personality of all time.
“Even by Fifa’s standards, this level of manoeuvring is so blatant, so obvious, that the audacity of ushering it through in plain sight almost defies belief,” Braidwood says.
“For Ronaldo, Fifa, and what is evolving into Trump’s World Cup, every minute of his involvement will be valued as if it’s a rare earth mineral; its content to be mined, packaged and exported to as wide an audience as possible. Surely, the show was never going to start without its biggest star,” he concluded.
