Cristiano Ronaldo’s walkout from Portugal’s training camp this week has already generated stories about the standoff itself. What it’s also generated is a real-time, measurable answer to a different question: what happens to a national federation’s digital audience when its biggest star walks away? According to Portuguese newspaper A Bola, the Portugal national team’s Instagram account had about 24,942,000 followers when the controversy broke Wednesday evening. By Thursday afternoon, that number had dropped to roughly 24,500,000, suggesting that the Ronaldo walkout cost Portugal’s FA 400,000 followers in under 24 hours. It’s one of the stranger side effects of the ongoing saga dominating international soccer this week.
Ronaldo Walkout Costs Portugal: The Instagram Numbers
Multiple outlets tracking the account independently landed in the same general range. Social media analytics platform Social Blade showed the federation’s page falling from 25 million to under 24.6 million within a day or so of the walkout, and other reporting citing the same drop put the figure at more than 400,000. That’s a 1.5 to 1.6 percent decline from an account with 25 million followers, in less than a day, which is a genuinely unusual rate of loss for an account of that size.
Conflicting Reports: How Big Was the Drop, Really?
Not every outlet agrees on the scale. The Sun reported the account falling from 24.9 million on Wednesday to 23.8 million by Thursday evening, over a million lost. Other reports have claimed figures as high as 1.5 million. Those numbers don’t match the more consistently sourced 400,000-to-500,000 range reported by Goal.com, africasoccer.com and others citing A Bola and Social Blade directly, and the inconsistency likely comes down to different snapshot times and some outlets possibly counting a longer window than just the first 24 hours. Until there’s a single, independently verified before-and-after count, the safest and most defensible number is the 400,000-plus figure.
‘We Were Following Ronaldo, Not Portugal’
The more interesting wrinkle is what the federation’s own comment section revealed about why people followed in the first place. A Bola reported comments flooding the account, including one reading, “We were not following Portugal, we were following Cristiano Ronaldo,” and another saying, “Now I no longer have to pretend that I like Portugal because of Cristiano.” A poll from the same outlet found 78.2% of respondents blame Ronaldo for the situation rather than coach Jorge Jesus, so the unfollowing wave doesn’t read as pure solidarity with him. It reads more like a mass admission that a huge chunk of Portugal’s online audience was never really following Portugal at all.
The scale of Ronaldo’s personal reach makes the whole episode feel almost absurd by comparison. He remains the most-followed individual account on Instagram worldwide, with 679 million followers, more than 27 times the size of the entire federation account that just lost hundreds of thousands of people in a day. Even his own account has shed followers over the past two weeks amid the uncertainty around his international future, though nowhere near the federation’s rate. Whatever happens next in the Ronaldo-Portugal standoff, this is the clearest evidence yet of just how much of Portugal’s digital following was always, really, a Ronaldo following on loan.
Ronaldo Walkout Costs Portugal 400,000+ Instagram Followers