Like millions around the world, I followed the matches of the World Cup with that passion and enthusiasm that football stirs in the soul, and like millions of Arabs, I sympathised with and cheered for the Arab national teams until one after another they were eliminated. I was saddened and I sympathised, but I know that this is football — this is the most beautiful and the worst thing about it. In the end, one team sits atop the golden cup's pyramid: the best, the strongest, the luckiest, the highest-priced, and certainly the one that generates billions for the ecosystem of the world's greatest game.
Setting aside the equations of profit and loss, and the corridors of billions and revenues, I have not been able, until this moment, to move past the moment when the referee announced the end of the match between Spain and Portugal — Spain winning, Portugal eliminated — and then Cristiano standing in tears before 90,000 spectators. That moment still stands before me even now. Beyond the analyses and interpretations, those tears were not, to me, the tears of a player who lost a match. They were the tears of a man who realised he had collided with the one opponent who cannot be defeated: time.
Every other defeat can be revisited. You can come back next season, or in the next tournament, or try a different way. Even deferred dreams still retain some possibility. But when the opponent is time, defeat takes on a different nature — because it is not defeat before a person or a team, but before the very law of existence.
What makes that moment so affecting is that Cristiano spent virtually his entire life proving that the impossible could be postponed. Every time it was said he was finished, he came back. Even when it was said that age had beaten him, he scored new goals at 42. He seemed to be negotiating with time for long years, wresting from it additional seasons that no one had expected. But on that night, for the first time, he knew with absolute certainty that there was no longer another chance or another season. He was looking at the pitch, but in truth he was looking at a door closing forever. He understood that the stadiums would still be there, that other World Cup tournaments would be held, that the cup would be lifted many more times after him — but he would not be there as a player. And after Portugal's exit against Spain, a dream he had chased for more than 20 years came to an end. The world sympathised with those tears because they were genuine tears — not for a cup he had not lifted, but for a time that would never return to him.
And perhaps what touched people most was the very paradox: Ronaldo had achieved almost everything a footballer could dream of, yet he continued to carry the wish of a child who wanted the World Cup.
When that dream ended, it was not only the legend who wept — the child who had lived inside him since his first match with Portugal wept too. And that is why so many saw in his tears a purely human moment, before it was ever a sporting one.