Cristiano Ronaldo
The Portuguese forward reaches 985 career goals after scoring three times in 15 second-half minutes as Al-Nassr beat Al-Kholood 5-3 in the Saudi Pro League.
By Martin Weche
Cristiano Ronaldo scored a hat-trick to help Al-Nassr to a 5-3 victory over Al-Kholood in the Saudi Pro League on Friday, taking the 41-year-old Portuguese forward to 985 career goals and within striking distance of an almost inconceivable milestone.
The game had been finely balanced at 2-2 when Ronaldo seized control, netting three times in a breathtaking 15-minute passage of second-half football to seal the win for the Saudi champions. Angelo Gabriel and Sadio Mane had earlier put Al-Nassr level after the home side threatened to make an afternoon of it, but Ronaldo — as he has done with metronomic regularity for more than two decades — rendered the contest academic before it could grow complicated.
Portugal team-mate João Félix was the architect of much of the damage, contributing four assists across the evening, two of them for Ronaldo’s goals. It was a partnership forged on the international stage now bearing fruit in the Gulf, and it served as a reminder that even in the closing chapter of one of sport’s most decorated careers, Ronaldo retains the ability to be the decisive figure in a match.
The hat-trick was the 67th of Ronaldo’s career — a number so staggering it bears a moment’s pause. Forty-four of those came during his magnificent years at Real Madrid, the theatre in which his legend was most comprehensively written. Ten were scored in the Portugal shirt, cementing his status as the all-time leading scorer in men’s international football, a record that may stand for a generation. Three arrived at Manchester United, across two separate spells at the club where he first announced himself to the world, and three more at Juventus during his three-year experiment in Serie A. Seven, including Friday’s, have now been registered for Al-Nassr — a tally that continues to grow with a consistency that has silenced early sceptics who questioned whether the Saudi Pro League represented a dignified final destination for a player of his stature.
Ronaldo joined Al-Nassr in January 2023 and has one year remaining on his current contract. In that time he has helped the club to the Saudi Pro League title and has added more than a century of goals to his career total in the kingdom. Yet it is the 1,000-goal landmark — 15 strikes away as of Friday evening — that now dominates the conversation surrounding every appearance he makes. No professional footballer in the history of the game has reached that figure in officially recognised competition. If Ronaldo gets there, and the trajectory of this season suggests he will, it will constitute one of the most remarkable individual achievements in the history of sport.
Al-Nassr are currently second in the Saudi Pro League table, one position behind leaders Al-Qadsiah, though they hold a game in hand — a detail their supporters will regard with considerable optimism as the defending champions seek back-to-back titles. For Ronaldo, the collective pursuit and the personal one are running in satisfying parallel.
There is a valedictory quality to this season that Ronaldo himself has done little to dispel. In August, he suggested that this was “probably” his last year playing — careful phrasing, characteristically noncommittal, but weighted enough to prompt the football world to pay close attention to every match, every goal, every record that falls. The five-time Ballon d’Or winner has claimed league titles in England, Spain, Italy and Saudi Arabia, a breadth of achievement across four different football cultures that no player of his era has replicated. He has scored at every level, in every competition, against every variety of opponent, and he has done so with a dedication to physical conditioning that has defied the natural laws of athletic ageing.
Friday’s hat-trick was not a nostalgic footnote. It was a performance. At 41, playing in the 67th hat-trick of his career, Ronaldo did what he has always done — arrived in the moments that mattered and made the game his own.
Fifteen goals stand between him and 1,000. If the last month is any measure, the wait will not be long.
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