Jorge Jesus won Ronaldo a title, then benched him for Portugal

Jorge Jesus

Photo: Palácio do Planalto / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 24, 1954 Amadora
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Copa Libertadores 2019 · Primeira Liga ×3 · Saudi Pro League ×2 · Turkish Cup 2022-23 · Saudi league · Intertoto Cup 2008-09 · league ×3 · League Cups ×5 · Portuguese Cup · Super Cup ×2 · Copa Libertadores final 2019 · Brazilian champions 2019
Individual awards	Primeira Liga Coach of the Year · Saudi Pro League Manager of the Season · Order of Prince Henry, Commander · Campeonato Brasileiro Série A

Four months earlier, Jorge Jesus was the coach who had finally delivered Cristiano Ronaldo a Saudi league title. Then, in his second match in charge of Portugal, he sent Ronaldo to warm up along the touchline for the best part of half an hour and left him there. Gonçalo Ramos, picked ahead of the captain, scored the winner in Oslo. Three days later Jesus told a press conference there had been “no incident whatsoever” and that Ronaldo would not play in the next game. Within hours Ronaldo announced on Instagram that he was leaving the camp.

The episode says a good deal about the job Jesus has taken on late in his working life. He has always been a club coach of the most hands-on kind: long sessions, positional patterns drilled until they become reflex, sessions stopped again and again to correct one player’s position. A national team gives him a few days between club fixtures. His appointment asks whether a method built on daily repetition survives on that timetable, and whether a coach who insists on controlling everything can afford a quarrel with the one Portuguese footballer bigger than any manager.

Football was the family trade before it was his. His father, Virgolino António de Jesus, played for Sporting in the 1940s, and the son came through the same club’s youth system after growing up in Amadora, on the north-western edge of Lisbon, where he was born on 24 July 1954. His maternal grandmother was born in Recife, in Brazil. As a midfielder he made a dozen first-team appearances for Sporting, then spent the rest of a long, itinerant playing career at Belenenses, União de Leiria, Vitória de Setúbal, Farense and his hometown club Estrela da Amadora, among others, before stopping at 36.

He started coaching in 1990 at Amora, in the lower divisions, and spent almost two decades in the unglamorous half of Portuguese football. He won promotion with Felgueiras, Vitória de Setúbal and Estrela da Amadora, went down with Moreirense and took Belenenses to fifth place and a cup final in 2007. At Braga in 2008-09 he won the final edition of the Intertoto Cup, a trophy no other Portuguese club ever lifted. He was 54 and had never run a big club.

Benfica hired him in June 2009, and his first season ended a five-year wait for the league title, playing a 4-1-3-2 that scored 78 league goals. Over six seasons he won ten trophies, a club record for a single coach: three championships, five League Cups, a Portuguese Cup and a Super Cup. In 2013-14 his team took the league, the Portuguese Cup and the League Cup together, the first domestic treble in Portuguese football. The same Benfica reached two consecutive Europa League finals, losing 2-1 to Chelsea in 2013 and to Sevilla on penalties in Turin a year later.

In June 2015 he crossed the city to Sporting, Benfica’s oldest rival. His first season there produced 86 points, a club record, and still finished two points short of Benfica. Three years brought a Super Cup and a League Cup, and they ended in violence: in May 2018 around fifty supporters forced their way into the club’s training ground and attacked the squad, and Jesus was among those hurt. Five days later Sporting lost the Portuguese Cup final to Aves, the third club with which he had lost that final.

Abroad, his reputation changed shape. After a first, cut-short spell at Al-Hilal, Flamengo signed him in 2019 to a hostile reception in Brazil, where commentators and former players called him too old and rival coaches credited Flamengo’s wins to the players and the club’s money. On 23 November 2019 in Lima, Flamengo came from behind in the closing minutes to beat River Plate 2-1 in the Copa Libertadores final, and within 24 hours the team were also Brazilian champions. He was the first foreign coach to win an international trophy with a Brazilian club. That December the President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, made him a Commander of the Order of Prince Henry.

The record also has a pattern his admirers tend to skip. Nearly all his league titles came at clubs with the deepest pockets in their competition, and his most expensive project was his least productive. Back at Benfica in 2020, after an investment of around 105 million euros in the squad, the biggest outlay in Portuguese football history, the team went out in Champions League qualifying, won nothing that season and lost the cup final. He left by mutual consent in December 2021. That defeat made four lost Portuguese Cup finals, a joint record. His temper has cost him too: in 2013 he was suspended for 30 days after getting physically involved when police tried to clear Benfica supporters from the pitch at Guimarães.

Saudi Arabia gave him his most complete results. After winning the Turkish Cup with Fenerbahçe in 2023, he returned to Al-Hilal, whose team won 34 consecutive matches in all competitions, a run certified by Guinness World Records, and took the 2023-24 league with a record 96 points. He left in May 2025 and two months later joined Al-Nassr on a one-year contract, saying he had come to help Ronaldo win the league. On 21 May 2026 Al-Nassr beat Damac 4-1 on the final night, Ronaldo scoring twice, to finish ahead of Al-Hilal, the side Jesus had built. He called it the most difficult project of his career.

Portugal’s World Cup ended in the round of 16 in Dallas, beaten 1-0 by Spain with a stoppage-time goal, and Roberto Martínez announced his departure that night. The federation presented Jesus on 10 July 2026, on a four-year contract that runs to the 2030 World Cup, which Portugal co-hosts. He promised no drastic changes and said of Ronaldo, “Cris is a player like any other.” The results so far are clean: 1-0 against Wales in Lisbon, 2-1 in Norway with Ronaldo unused, and a 4-2 win over Denmark in Copenhagen without him, with four different scorers.

He is married to Ivone, with whom he has a son, Mauro, and has a daughter, Tânia, and a son, Gonçalo, from an earlier marriage.

Portugal close this international window at home to Norway on 4 October, top of their Nations League group with three wins from three. The harder question sits outside the results. Ronaldo is 41, has suggested this will probably be his final season and has promised to tell the Portuguese public his version of why he left. How Jesus handles that conversation will decide whether his first weeks are remembered for the football or for the walkout.

Tags: sports, athletes, Cristiano Ronaldo, football managers, Al-Nassr, Flamengo, Jorge Jesus