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ATLANTA — Roberto Martinez has been to a Super Bowl here at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. He has worked for American broadcast networks CBS and ESPN. He’s maintained a relationship with the United States for more than a decade, and even trekked to a coaches’ convention in Philadelphia two months ago. But still, when he visited the States last summer for the FIFA Club World Cup, “it really alerted me to many red flags,” Martinez says.
And that, in part, is why he and the Portuguese men’s national team are here this week, for a Tuesday friendly against the U.S., to conclude the penultimate stage of their 2026 World Cup prep.
Yes, they are here to test themselves against the USMNT — this March window was “the only opportunity that we have to play Concacaf teams,” Martinez, Portugal’s coach of three years, said — but even more so to acclimate and experience all those “red flags” first-hand.
By “red flags,” he means the “many aspects” and “logistics” of the upcoming World Cup that will be “very unique, very different.” He means the travel, the weather and diversity of climates, the training times and locations, and so on. The tournament, hosted by 16 cities across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, will be unlike any previous World Cup. And the best way to prepare for the uniqueness, Martinez and his Portugal staff decided, was to live it.
“The more moments that we can spend on the ground, in the areas that we’re gonna be,” Martinez said a day after the World Cup draw in December, “the better.”
That’s why they scheduled Saturday’s match against Mexico, a 0-0 draw, and Tuesday’s against the U.S. One at altitude in Mexico City, one on a temporary grass pitch indoors.
FIFA’s schedulers didn’t ultimately send Portugal to a city where altitude will attack players’ aerobic capacities, but in other ways, this week and last will be analogous. The flight from Mexico, the night-before training session, the inevitable traffic, the closed-roof environment — all of it will mirror what Portuguese players, some for the first time, will encounter this summer.
It will not help them prepare for the humidity of Miami, the site of their third group-stage game against Colombia. But their first two, against either DR Congo or Jamaica and then Uzbekistan, will be in Houston, at the indoor NRG Stadium. Tuesday’s indoor friendly here will give them a taste.
And then, everything they do in June will ready them.
Martinez, equipped with his learnings from the Club World Cup, when he spent significant time in Miami, has crafted a plan to cope with the World Cup’s complexities. First, he will give every player “seven days off at the end of their season,” he said in January, because “it’s incredible, the mental fatigue that you accumulate.” Then, after the brief break with families — “just try to get a period on the beach, switch off,” Martinez said — they will gather in Portugal for training and friendlies.
Why not arrive in the U.S. earlier?
Because that would exacerbate personal burdens of the World Cup. “We’re talking about managing a player being away from their family for 50 days,” Martinez said. Typically, for big games in the Champions League or domestic leagues, “they have one night away from their families,” he noted. “And now you’re going to ask them … to stay 50 days from newborn babies, from families, from out of your routine?”
Helping players manage that burden, he said, “is winning a World Cup; that’s where the work is.”
When they do get to the States, they’ll spend as much time as possible in South Florida. They’ll base-camp about an hour north of Miami. They’ll fly to Houston the day before each of the first two matches, then back to South Florida hours after each. The idea, Martinez indicated, is to generate comfort there. It’s to replicate the Qatar 2022 experience — “where you had your bed, your hotel, you didn’t have to move,” Martinez said — as much as possible. It’s to adjust to heat and address all those other “red flags.”
Then, with logistics sorted, he and his players can focus on what they do best: coaching and playing soccer.
Cristiano Ronaldo hugs Portugal manager Roberto Martinez after triumph in the 2025 UEFA Nations League (Lars Baron / Getty Images)
Portugal minus Ronaldo
Martinez’s Portugal roster for Tuesday’s friendly features one of the best midfields in international soccer. Bruno Fernandes is in the form of his life at Manchester United. Vitinha and João Neves were two of the engines that propelled PSG to last season’s Champions League title. (Manchester City’s Bernardo Silva is typically involved, but he was left off this roster for load management reasons.)
The squad is also strong in wide areas. PSG’s Nuno Mendes, Barcelona’s João Cancelo and Man United’s Diogo Dalot are among the fullbacks. Francisco Conceição, Juventus teammate of U.S. star Weston McKennie, is among the wingers (Christian Pulisic’s AC Milan teammate, Rafael Leão withdrew from the squad due to injury).
The biggest hole is at center back. Rúben Dias, like Bernardo Silva, is back in Manchester. His deputies lack experience.
And the most notable absence, of course, is Cristiano Ronaldo.
Ronaldo is recovering from a hamstring injury suffered at his Saudi club, Al Nassr, a month ago. He did not make the trip to Mexico nor to the United States, where he hasn’t played in over a decade.
Martinez, though, said upon announcing the squad that Ronaldo was “not at risk” of missing the World Cup. “It’s a minor muscle injury, and we think he can be back in a week or two,” the 52-year-old Spanish coach said. “Everything Cristiano has done physically this season shows he’s in great shape.”
Martinez, in general, has publicly and explicitly supported Ronaldo, the Portuguese legend whose declining performance and attitude led to a benching at the 2022 World Cup. Then-coach Fernando Santos replaced him with Gonçalo Ramos, who subsequently scored a hat trick and looked like Portugal’s striker of the future.
But Ronaldo has since won back his place. And Martinez reiterated earlier this month that the place is still unquestionably his when healthy.
“I’ve already said that for the World Cup, the center forward position belongs to Cristiano and Gonçalo Ramos,” Martinez said, “and [for the third spot,] we’re looking for a striker with a different profile.”
Martinez, in this sense, has taken a much different approach to management than USMNT boss Mauricio Pochettino, who has said he treats Pulisic the same as fringe players and has repeated that nobody’s spot on the 26-man roster or in the starting 11 is secure.
And whereas Pochettino hardly talks with players outside training camps, and did not travel to meet any of them after taking the job, Martinez immediately reached out and tried to build deep relationships. He said he traveled to meet 32 players — 26 from the previous roster before he got hired, plus others who’d been heavily involved — soon after taking charge in 2023.
“It’s there that you get to know the person behind the footballer,” Martinez said. “You have to have difficult conversations with the players, where you speak about everything and anything apart from football.”
Roberto Martinez preps his players before a Euro 2024 penalty shootout vs. France (Odd Andersen / AFP / Getty Images)
Martinez on coaching Ronaldo and egos
Martinez has been unafraid to speak with something resembling reverence about Ronaldo.
What’s it like to coach the 41-year-old superstar?
“Well, it’s a learning curve,” Martinez said in January at the United Soccer Coaches Convention in Philadelphia. “You learn so much from your players.”
He went on to talk about perfectionism, and then said: “the longevity of Cristiano Ronaldo is incredible. Every day, he uses it as an opportunity to be better than yesterday. And that’s something — we can measure everything, but you cannot measure the hunger of an individual.
“If he won the Champions League, if he won best player in the world the day before, the next day doesn’t get affected.”
Players like Ronaldo, he said, “need to be stimulated, and you need to work on the environment. … It’s so easy to coach these players, because they want to win. They look after themselves to the maximum. They are obsessed with anything to [get] a little advantage. Could be nutrition, could be tactical, could be the opposition; they are obsessed. But they are demanding of the others, and they are demanding of the environment.”
He then spoke about how he tries to shape the Portuguese national team’s environment. There are three pillars, he explained: “clarity,” “no I in team,” and “constant improvement.”
On the first pillar, he said: “You take for granted that everybody knows their own responsibility, what to do on the pitch and off the pitch, and that that doesn’t need to be reviewed. And that’s one of the biggest mistakes: [coaches] don’t give clarity, or review clarity, of each player. It’s not just in sport, it happens in business, any location, any group of people that work for the same objective, they need to have incredible clarity.”
And on the second — the alignment of individual goals with a shared team goal — he said that the message to players is: “From now on, you mean nothing. You need to do what the team needs.”
“And this is the biggest line of high performance teams,” he continued. It doesn’t mean that individual goals and purposes don’t matter. Every player’s “why” is “valuable,” Martinez said. “But it’s very different from one person to another. … So you need to know why that person is there, and what is his or her objective, and then align it to the success of the team. That means when the team loses, the purpose of the individual is still there, and they will see a reaction and keep fighting.”
He was later asked about managing a team with so many egos. He challenged the premise, or at least the overtone, of the question, and said: “You need to have an ego to play football. Don’t tell me that a person that needs to play in front of 70,000 people, maybe 1 billion viewers around the world, doesn’t need an ego. He does, and the bigger the ego, the easier it is to be a footballer that makes a difference.
“We make the mistake to say ego [equals] bad attitude. This is very different. An ego with bad attitude … we call them ‘bombs’. Before you go into a [training] session, you assess a player normally for the energy and the attitude. Ideally you want great energy, great attitude. Those are fantastic players. But the reality is, you have many players with no energy in training … those can affect the session. And then you got the ones with bad attitude and big energy. And those are the ones that people call ‘egos.’ No, it’s not ego, it’s a bad attitude. And you need to get rid of the bad attitude. … That’s a big difference. … Don’t confuse ego with bad attitude.
“Ideally you want 11 or 26 egos,” he said, “with great attitude.”
And the ones whose attitudes create problems, he indicated, would have no place in the national team.
Roberto Martinez managing against Mauricio Pochettino in an Everton-Tottenham match in 2016 (Dave Thompson/Getty Images)
Martinez, Pochettino share approach to World Cup squad-building
This is one area in which Martinez is similar to Pochettino, the coach he’ll face Tuesday. Pochettino has spoken about choosing “the right 26” players for his World Cup roster. “Not the best, the right 26.” Martinez takes the same approach.
“You don’t pick the best 26 players,” he said. “You pick the best 26 members that make the best team — which is a concept difficult to understand. If you got a player that plays every game, every minute, he’s the star of their team, and he comes to the national team and he can only play five, six minutes, only can be a supporting player, it’s a completely different role. And it’s very, very difficult to have a committed player in that role.
“So for us, it comes down to: pick the best group of 26 that are gonna make the best team.”
That is what he’s been trying to assess over the past week, with a group of players that is, in part, experimental. He’s assessing their talent, and how their experience (or lack thereof) shapes their behavior, but he’s also assessing attitudes.
“I think that attitude is essential,” he said back in January, “to be able to be part of the 1 to 26 that we’re trying to develop.”
