Can Ibracadabra cast his spell over 'obsessive' CR7 - Cristiano Ronaldo?

Within a few hours of Sepp Blatter's teasing impersonation of Cristiano Ronaldo at the Oxford Union circulating on the Internet at the end of last month, some resourceful Lisbonites set to work on their protest. By nightfall it was up, a six-foot laminated banner, hung from railings at the busy Rato junction. "Blatter, You're Offside!" it read, "Ronaldo is the Greatest."

The banner stayed for several days, sharing space with other protest art, fliers announcing strikes or demonstrations, graffiti casting blame for the country's economic crisis. Portugal the nation suffers daily and wearily because of its empty treasury. Insult its national football treasure and it galvanises. The Fifa president said later that he meant no offence with his light-hearted strut, mimicking Ronaldo's martial gait whenever he approaches a dead ball.

Nor did Blatter mean harm by stating, in the same talk to Oxford students, he marginally preferred Lionel Messi, with whom Ronaldo has been disputing status as the world's best player for most of the last five years. Blatter added that, to his mind, the Messi-Ronaldo duopoly at the summit of individual brilliance is currently challenged more significantly than at any time in five years, and cited Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Paris St-Germain's Swedish striker. Awkwardly for Fifa, only two of that magic trio can participate at their showpiece event next summer.

Over the coming five days, either Ibrahimovic or Ronaldo are going to knock the other out. According to Ibrahimovic, his Sweden are the more deserving of a place in Brazil than Ronaldo's Portugal. "We finished second in a very hard group, while they finished second in one they should have won," said Ibrahimovic. If it sounded like a dig at a Portugal who find themselves in a play-off because, runners-up to Russia, they could not take more than two points from Israel, and barely scraped a draw in Lisbon against Northern Ireland, he was also proud of captaining a side who scored seven times in two qualifying matches against Germany, a Sweden for whom he has had perhaps his best 12 months in a decade.

Try as they might, it is hard for the coaches of Portugal or Sweden, and for the 20 other mortals who start tomorrow's (Saturday's) Lisbon leg of their World Cup play-off not to distil the contest into a joust between two men. "Ibrahimovic doesn't play on his own," insisted Bruno Alves, the Portugal defender likely to be assigned marking duties on Sweden's skipper.

"Yes, he can change a game in a moment, but he's also got to get the service from team-mates." Then Alves got to the nub: "Denying Ibrahimovic space is the key." And for the home team? It would be 11 against 11, said Alves, although Portugal's XI do have a special one. "If there is one player in our team who is irreplaceable, it is Ronaldo, the best in the world. He can settle a game on his own." Even if Ronaldo and Ibrahimovic, CR7 and 'Ibracadabra', were not towering over the fixture because of their fame, form casts them as accelerating juggernauts, colliding at maximum speed. Last weekend, Ronaldo struck a hat-trick for Real Madrid against Real Sociedad. So did Ibrahimovic for PSG against Nice. During their last seven matches, across competitions, the pair have scored 25 goals between them, 12 for the 6ft 4in Swede, 13 for the Portuguese.

Nor are these freakishly prolific streaks. Ronaldo has racked up 62 goals in 2013; Ibrahimovic scored 30 times in France's Ligue 1 last season, matching a 23-year-old domestic landmark while guiding PSG to their first title this century. Real Madrid and PSG, two of the most ostentatious and high-spending clubs in the world, have made these men the sport's highest earners, built their tactics around them and based their corporate strategies on their image.

And those clubs are very glad to have done so. For their national teams, occupying such a high pedestal is more complicated, less negotiable. Both Sweden and Portugal are captained by exceptional sportsmen, who both grew up with a self-consciousness about being seen as outsiders. When Ronaldo arrived as a child prodigy at Sporting Lisbon, he stood out because, uniquely, he was from the island of Madeira. Contemporaries laughed at his thick offshore accent. Ibrahimovic is the son of Balkan immigrants, he was in trouble at school and remains an incorrigible maverick. Their individualism made both stand out. Alex Ferguson, the manager who exported Ronaldo from Portuguese football recalls, in his recent memoirs, the moment he first saw him play with unrestrained joy: it was, Ferguson writes, "the biggest surge of excitement, of anticipation I experienced in football management".

Leo Beenhakker, the former head coach of Ajax who signed a gangly teenager from Malmo, remembers being struck by how unlike the prototype Scandinavian Ibrahimovic seemed: "You saw him doing things Swedish players had never done before." Once they left home, Ibrahimovic and Ronaldo soared, achieving milestone after milestone in club football. But in the decade since they established themselves as figureheads for their countries, their national teams have declined.

Tomorrow's contest is between a side ranked 14th by Fifa, and one rated 25th. At Euro 2004, a 22-year-old Ibrahimovic announced himself to a global audience, with a brilliantly unorthodox goal, a back-heeled volley against Italy for a Sweden who would go within a penalty shoot-out of the semi-final. Ronaldo, then 19, maturely helped Portugal, in front of home crowds, to the final. He cried when his team lost 1-0 to Greece. Neither Sweden nor Portugal have gone as far as they did at any major since.

Their superstar individuals are either keeping inferior company in their squads or casting too great a personal shadow. Ibrahimovic's early Sweden career gave him the distinguished Henrik Larsson - with whom he dovetailed and who he admired - as a striking partner, and the lively Freddie Ljungberg - with whom he quarrelled off the pitch - as a foil. With their retirements, Sweden became more mundane, more 'Ibra-centric'. "Zlatan is a wonderful footballer," says the former Sweden and Liverpool defender, Glenn Hysen, "but there have been times when there's been an idea that every ball should go via him and for some periods Sweden have even looked better without Zlatan."

The Portugal in which Ronaldo debuted had two or three superstars. It still called on Luis Figo, one of Ronaldo's predecessors as a record-breaking Real Madrid recruit; it had the former AC Milan No?10, Rui Costa, and the country's record goalscorer, Pauleta. Though Joao Moutinho is a midfielder of recognised pedigree, the current squad has fewer icons. Expectation that Nani might emerge as a new Figo on the flanks has long expired. Ronaldo must be that. He must do what Rui Costa did at set pieces, must provide the goals Pauleta used to.

"Ronaldo is a player in a different class," said Paulo Bento, the Portugal coach, "and it's an honour to have him." It is also an obligation for any Portugal coach to ensure Ronaldo stays faithful. Several of his contemporaries - like Ricardo Carvalho, Deco and Jose Bosingwa - called time on their international careers while still playing at a high level for their clubs, frustrated at the environment. Ronaldo's exasperation with a Portugal is sometimes explicit. At Euro 2012, he exhibited it through gestures, arms spread out, fingers pointing to where passes never arrived, colleagues' runs should have been directed. "Cristiano is an obsessive perfectionist," says Jorge Valdano, the sports director at Real Madrid when Ronaldo began his career there, a record-breaking pounds 81?million signing from Manchester United.

At Euro 2012, Portugal made the semis, and held Spain goalless for 120 minutes. The penalty shoot-out, though, would go wrong. There was confusion over the order of kickers; at one stage Nani and Alves were both walking up to take the same kick. Spain had won before 10 kicks were completed, the Spanish players mystified why Ronaldo, an expert from 11 metres, had not taken one. Bento said he had been pencilled in for the fifth. Spain have been Portugal and Ronaldo's nemesis at the last two major international tournaments - both of which Portugal required play-offs to reach - and several of Spain's senior players, some of them club colleagues of Ronaldo's, have developed a policy in the immediate build up to kick-off: Ignore Ronaldo, don't even look at him. They reckon Ronaldo becomes unsettled by that.

The Swedes, touching down in Lisbon this afternoon, will find it hard to avoid looking at Ronaldo, or at least his image. He's not just on protest art, he's on advertising hoardings, celebrity magazine covers. But when the Portuguese reach Stockholm on Monday they'll have the same sensation. Ibrahimovic towers not just over his sport, but his country's public life. On Monday, the Swedish postal service even announced he is to be honoured on a new set of stamps, the maverick as monarch.