It started with a fairly standard post-match interview.After Portugal’s 1-1 draw with DR Congo in their opening game of the World Cup, midfielder Joao Neves was asked about Cristiano Ronaldo who, you may have noticed, tends to dominate the debate around their fixtures.A journalist asked Neves: “This Portugal team is very collective. It’s also Cristiano Ronaldo’s last World Cup. How do you manage all that — having such a big star but also a strong team with numerous other big players at this World Cup?”And he responded: “We know what Cristiano Ronaldo has done for our national team and for the world of football. But at this moment I feel that for him, and for everyone, he’s one of us, one more guy trying to help. He’s no different to the rest of us and he will contribute like we all will.”So far, so unremarkable. Maybe, if Neves was speaking at a time other than about 20 minutes after a disappointing result in a World Cup, his head all over the place and confronted with a scrum of microphone-waving journalist, he might have worded his answer slightly differently, given how people tend to react to anything involving Ronaldo.But the intention was pretty clear: Neves was saying that this is a team sport, Ronaldo is part of the team and they will figure all of this out together, as a team.Enter the modern world. The interview was clipped up and did the rounds on the internet, giving the impression that Neves had said that Ronaldo was an ‘ordinary’ player. Stripped of context and nuance, that was a red rag to some tediously familiar bulls.As anyone conversant with social media will tell you, this is where things get sticky. Because there is a certain element of the online community that cannot countenance anything approaching criticism of Ronaldo.As such, when a fairly standard post-match carousel of photos appeared on Neves’s Instagram account, it was flooded with comments from Ronaldo’s fanboys. They appeared on Bruno Fernandes and Vitinha’s accounts too. We won’t recount them all here but the general theme was that Ronaldo should be given his due respect, and that they should pass him the ball more.Things then took a further turn for the dystopian, when Madalena Aragao, a Portuguese actress and Neves’s partner, posted a picture of herself and Neves, which was also targeted by the same sort of people. She was then forced to limit replies to her posts, but that didn’t stop a fake quote attributed to her appearing on some other accounts, which urged those Ronaldo fans to “tell your GOAT to retire”.Regrettably, that quote was briefly taken as real by Georgina Rodriguez, Ronaldo’s partner. She posted a screenshot of it with the caption: ‘Wow! Look at how the future generations are brought up!’ Luckily, she appeared to realise fairly quickly that it was fake, and deleted her post.It’s quite difficult not to turn into a grumpy old man about all of this, to decry the corrosive influence of social media and hark back to the good old days before the internet, when players spent their times between games playing board games and unhinged fans’ access to them was more limited.Ronaldo talks with Joao Neves after his goal against DR Congo (Leslie Plaza Johnson/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)This appears not to be the fault of anyone in the Portugal camp. A misinterpretation/misrepresentation of a quote and a fake social media post have combined to create a situation that, at best, will be a distraction they don’t need. The official line will be that they don’t let this stuff permeate the group, but these things have a way of finding their way through even the fiercest deflector shields.As if Portugal didn’t have enough to be concerned about at this World Cup, having started the tournament in disappointing fashion with questions about the balance of their side, both internally and externally. You hope that they are broadly insulated from it. You hope that the companies they employ to manage their social media do their jobs and keep the worst away from them.Neves gave a standard answer in an interview, and in reaction to an incorrect interpretation of it, he has been subject to abuse. Aragao suffered an all-too-familiar situation, also subject to abuse for existing as a woman on the internet.Rodriguez too, who was fooled briefly by a fake internet post, which it’s difficult to criticise her too harshly for, given we don’t know what’s real either: we have no idea how many of those accounts are actually real people, whether they’re real comments representing real sentiment.You also have to have some sympathy for Ronaldo, whatever your opinions of him are. He invites warranted criticism with some of his actions, but here he has done nothing and has still ended up in the middle of something unnecessary, a needless problem he now has to deal with.Welcome to the 2026 World Cup, dystopian edition.