Cristiano Ronaldo row linked to 400,000-follower fall for Portugal

The official Portugal national team Instagram account lost more than 400,000 followers in less than 24 hours after the dispute involving Cristiano Ronaldo and Jorge Jesus.

The sharp decline followed Ronaldo’s departure from Portugal’s training camp in Denmark on Wednesday evening, as the fallout from comments made by Jorge Jesus quickly spread from the football world to social media.

According to Portuguese newspaper A Bola, the national team account had about 24,942,000 followers when the controversy erupted on Wednesday evening. By Thursday afternoon, that figure had fallen to approximately 24,500,000.

Several comments circulated online in response to the drop in followers.

“We were not following Portugal, we were following Cristiano Ronaldo,” read one message reported by A Bola.

Another said: “Now I no longer have to pretend that I like Portugal because of Cristiano. He was the only good player in this team.”

Ronaldo’s sister reacts

The figures also drew a response from Ronaldo’s sister, Elma Aveiro, who shared details of the fall in the national team account’s following through Instagram Stories.

She accompanied the posts with messages that appeared to refer directly to the situation.

“Betrayal is a dish best served cold… Here, people do something and here, they pay the price. The way forward,” she wrote, echoing the familiar expression: “What goes around comes around.”

In another post, Aveiro added: “Here we are, the world goes around in many cycles.”

Ronaldo remains the most-followed individual on Instagram, with a total of 679 million followers.

However, his own account has also lost more than 500,000 followers over the past 15 days, during the latest developments surrounding his future with Portugal.