The air is thick with “Siiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu…”

The sound of Portugal fans repeating Cristiano Ronaldo’s signature goalscoring cry will be familiar to anyone who has attended any of their games at this World Cup. Or indeed, any of their games anywhere.

It serves as a sort of monosyllabic call and response. Someone yells “siiiiuuuu”, then any fellow admirers within earshot respond with “sssiiiiiuuuuu”, then anyone who didn’t hear the first one will yell “ssssiiiiiuuuuuuu”, and it all starts to echo around your head, as if you’re in a cave and all you can see are people wearing a No. 7 Portugal shirt.

But it’s not just during games. It’s before games, after games, on days where there isn’t a game. You hear it in bars, on the train, walking down the street. A few hours after Portugal beat Uzbekistan 5-0 in their second group game, Pinkerton’s BBQ in Houston is full of people in Ronaldo shirts, and every few minutes the shout goes up, piercing the atmosphere of mid-level bonhomie.

Attending a Portugal game, it’s extraordinary — if perhaps not entirely surprising — just how many Ronaldo shirts you see. It’s genuinely rarer to see a shirt without his name on the back: at points it feels like you’re in football’s answer to Being John Malkovich, only instead of multiple Malkovich heads, it’s Ronaldo shirts.

Over two games in Houston, attended by almost 150,000 people in total, I saw thousands wearing Portugal shirts with his name and number on the back, a lower but still significant group with no number on the back and literally two featuring any other player.

There was one Vitinha, and one Bruno Fernandes: in comparison to the masses, choosing a double Champions League-winner and the current Premier League player of the year feels like a niche act of wilful obscurity. Like picking a demo version of The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill as your favourite Beatles song rather than, say, Hey Jude.

The next most common genre is Ronaldo club shirts. Manchester United shirts from both of his two spells (plus one from 2009-10, which was irritating considering he never wore that one). Real Madrid. Juventus. A few Sporting shirts with ‘Ronaldo 28’ on the back, from when he was a teenager. And, relatively rare but still visible, were some from Al-Nassr, his current club in Saudi Arabia.

Hero worship in football is nothing new. But the cult of personality around Ronaldo is something else. So much so that a decent proportion of the fans there for Portugal’s games are not there to see a World Cup game, or to really support either team playing, but purely for him.

“I’m just here to see Ronaldo,” says Pablo, wearing a 2008 Manchester United jersey. “He’s a legend. I want to see history. Never seen him play before.”

Ronaldo fans make their point (Nick Miller/The Athletic)

Kevin has travelled from Los Angeles, in his Al-Nassr shirt, and paid $600 for his ticket. “Ronaldo all day,” he says, when asked if he was here to see the game, or to see Ronaldo. Is it a problem that Ronaldo isn’t the player he was? “Not at all! His teammates need to support him more. They’ve played more passes backwards than forwards.”

Tony has come from El Paso, Texas. His whole family are wearing Ronaldo shirts. “It’s a dream come true to see him in person,” he says. “He’s going to score at least two goals today.” This was before the Uzbekistan game, so the prediction came to pass.

Alex and Carolina have travelled from Mexico to see him play. They’re both wearing 2021-22 United shirts with his name and number on the back. Carolina removes hers to reveal a Portugal shirt with his name and number on the back, underneath that. They’re slightly shy about telling what they spent on tickets, other than to say it’s a lot. Were they worried he wasn’t going to play? “Yes, but that’s the game,” says Alex. “We had to take the chance.”

Santiago is an interesting case. He walks past wearing what can only be described as a garish Ronaldo shirt that appears to have no connection with any of his club teams, or Portugal. It turns out that he bought it from Facebook Marketplace. I approach him, I confess, with the expectation that I’m about to hear something pretty unhinged. But not so.

“I respect his athleticism, but not his character,” Santiago, who is a PE teacher and has travelled from New Mexico for this game. “He’s kind of a s—head. He has an outsized ego. He’s a physical specimen, and has reached the peak of athleticism, but somehow still thinks he’s better than he is.”

During games, the noise from the crowd when Ronaldo is shown on the big screens is utterly deafening. Equally whenever he touches the ball. It might be an exaggeration to say that a routine layoff from Ronaldo is greeted with more enthusiasm than a goal by the other Portuguese players, but it’s not much of one.

IShowSpeed, the social media star who has made being a Ronaldo superfan a significant part of his brand/personality, is there for both Portugal games in Houston, wearing a Ronaldo shirt, although his appearances on the screens are not greeted with quite as much acclaim. On one occasion it takes him a few seconds to spot that the cameras are on him, and they cut away just as he starts to do the “siiiiuuuu” celebration.

This sort of stuff is not unique to Ronaldo. There will have been people at Argentina’s games just there to see Lionel Messi, Brazil for Vinicius Junior, Norway for Erling Haaland. Football isn’t just about tribalism or supporting either team, it’s about admiring talent, appreciating feats of individualism, being there to witness — if you’ll excuse the potentially overblown language — beauty, in whatever form that takes.

It just feels like it is ramped up to another level with Ronaldo. A pet theory is that, to some, Ronaldo feels slightly more relatable than Messi, in that the Argentinean’s genius is more weighted towards natural talent: he’s an alien, to be admired rather than aspired to. Ronaldo obviously has plenty of that talent, but he has partly made himself into an astonishing footballer by turning himself into an astonishing athlete, through physical gifts but also discipline and a titanium-strength mentality. It’s possible to think — probably erroneously — that anyone with a gym membership could do that.

It’s tempting to think of the Ronaldo worship culture as broadly an online thing, mainly young men who defend their guy to the end, who flood the replies to any vaguely-related post with comments either lauding their hero or eviscerating anyone they have perceived to have wronged him. That ranges from the relatively mild/harmless comments under any critical articles about him, to abuse directed at his teammates, through to abuse directed at his teammates’ partners. They present themselves as speaking on his behalf, even though there’s no evidence that he encourages this sort of behaviour in any way.

Fans make their allegiance to Cristiano Ronaldo clear before the game against Uzbekistan (Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images)

But these games are evidence that it’s just as clear in the real world, too. The difference between those who follow him online and those who do so in person seems mainly that the latter is driven by positivity towards him, rather than negativity towards those who are perceived to be against him.

If you speak to those who have come to see him, they will tell you they’re here to watch their hero, to witness one of the greatest players of all time before it’s too late. Beyond the odd comment blaming his lack of goals on the service he receives from his teammates, it largely seems to be an expression of old-fashioned hero worship, just on a grander and more visually overwhelming scale.

It’s undoubtedly quite jarring, in what is ostensibly a team sport, to see so much attention focused on an individual. But it’s also much more wholesome than you might think if you only otherwise experience it on Instagram.

To a point, these people are here to see a monument of football, rather than attend a football match: ideally they’d like to see Ronaldo score, or at least do something notable, but that’s an optional extra. That it’s an undeniably diminished, 40-year-old version of him, and he probably shouldn’t even be in the Portugal team, doesn’t seem to matter too much.

They just want to see one of the greats at a World Cup, before it’s too late. And it’s difficult to be too sniffy about that.