Cristiano Ronaldo becomes oldest World Cup goalscorer since Roger Milla, surpasses Eusébio

At 41 years and 138 days old, Cristiano Ronaldo is still doing things no one else has done. His two-goal performance against Uzbekistan on June 23, 2026, pushed his World Cup career total to 10 goals, breaking a Portuguese national record that Eusébio had held since 1966. That is not a typo. Sixty years.

The match ended 5-0 in Portugal’s favor, and Ronaldo’s brace served as his introduction to the 2026 World Cup.

What actually happened, and why the numbers matter

Eusébio scored nine World Cup goals, all of them at the 1966 tournament in England, where Portugal finished third. That record survived twelve World Cups, multiple generations of Portuguese football, and the entire careers of Luis Figo, Rui Costa, and everyone else who came after him.

His career World Cup goal tally now sits at 10, accumulated across appearances from 2006 through 2026. No other player in World Cup history has scored in six consecutive tournaments.

Only Roger Milla, the Cameroonian striker who scored at the 1994 World Cup at age 42, has scored at a later age than Ronaldo in the tournament’s history.

The Eusébio record and what it meant to Portuguese football

Eusébio da Silva Ferreira is not just a statistic in Portuguese football history. He is the standard. Born in Mozambique and raised through the Benfica academy, he was the tournament’s top scorer at the 1966 World Cup with nine goals, including four in a single quarterfinal match against North Korea.

Ronaldo has been chasing Eusébio’s record for years, adding goals slowly across multiple tournaments. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar ended early for Portugal, and Ronaldo’s role in that squad was publicly debated.

What this means for the fan token market and digital sports assets

Portugal’s fan token, trading under the ticker POR on the Chiliz platform, saw heightened trading activity correlating with the national team’s results in the tournament. Fan tokens are blockchain-based assets that give holders voting rights on minor club or national team decisions, along with access to exclusive content.

Ronaldo’s presence in the broader digital asset space extends beyond fan tokens. He has an existing NFT collection on Binance, which reflects a longer-term bet that athlete-associated digital content has durable value beyond the immediate news cycle.

Fan token markets are small, thinly traded relative to major crypto assets, and highly susceptible to sentiment swings. Ronaldo breaking a 60-year-old record is exactly the kind of catalyst that drives inflows. The Chiliz ecosystem and Binance’s athlete NFT partnerships are both betting on expanded mainstream adoption of fan engagement products in this World Cup cycle.

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