Category News

Portugal vs. Spain: Who is it?
What: UEFA Nations League final
Where: Allianz Arena, Munich, Germany
When: Sunday, June 8, 2025 – 3pm kickoff (13:00 GMT)

How to follow our coverage on Al Jazeera Sport starting at 12 p.m. (10:00 GMT).

As Portugal and Spain prepare to face off for the UEFA Nations League trophy, the pair have one of the most highly anticipated international finals in a long time.

Cristiano Ronaldo and Lamine Yamal, two of football’s greatest talents, are also pitted against each other in the final.

Both had a significant role in helping their teams survive Sunday’s showdown in Munich despite their careers being at different ends.

Ronaldo vs. Yamal is a mouth-watering prospect, and Al Jazeera Sport takes a closer look at the game.

Portugal’s route to the Nations League final: how did it do it?

Ronaldo scored the winning goal in Portugal’s first semifinal victory on Wednesday, beating the host nation Germany 2-1.

Before Francisco Conceicao equalized just past the hour mark, the Germans took the lead early in the second half thanks to Florian Wirtz, who had already given the Germans the lead. Five minutes later, the winner was scored.

How did Spain fare against France in the semifinal?

After going 4-0 and 5-0 down, Spain and France unleashed one of the greatest scorers in a 5-4 thriller.

Yamal outscored Kylian Mbappe, Ousmane Dembele, and Desire Doue, who both came off the heels of Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League triumph, scoring twice and acting the star.

The UEFA Nations League final’s significance is how?

These final three games of the competition’s final three games, which are scheduled for 2024-2025, will be crucial game time before the 2026 FIFA World Cup, without a doubt, as well as the semifinalists who were defeated.

The tournament itself, which offers competitive games to keep club-focused players interested during the world’s international breaks, has replaced the much-maligned and ever-more meaningless list of friendlies between continents with qualification over a two-year period.

The outcome of the two semifinals has heightened anticipation for the already notable final, and given the Nations League’s reputation as a warm-up competition between the more prestigious World Cups and UEFA European Champions, both of which occur every four years, a new level.

After winning against France in the final, Yamal made the comment that he was playing against Ronaldo. He is a legend in football. I’ll do what I’m supposed to do, win the game, and that’s it.

Is this Lamine Yamal’s shining moment?

The showdown between former Real Madrid and Manchester United legend Ronaldo will receive a lot of attention from the outside world in the course of the game.

Yamal will turn 18 next month, and the Catalan club’s star players have already sparked conjectures with their recent successes, helping them to a domestic treble this year, with their latest addition. The Barca-born forward also excelled for Spain in the semifinal match against France from last summer’s Euro 2024 success, just days shy of his 17th birthday.

Ronaldo, who is regarded as one of the greatest footballers of all time, gives Yamal a unique and potentially final chance to show himself against a player who is closing down his career at 40 years old.

Is Yamal up for Ballon d’Or?

With Ronaldo and Argentinian legend Lionel Messi emerging as the game’s top current stars and Yamal’s stock steadily rising this year, it has been questioned whether there is a change of guard.

Both are strong contenders to win the Ballon d’Or trophy, which honors the best player in the world each year. After guiding Manchester City to their unique five-trophy winning year in 2023, Spanish international Rodri is the current holder.

Dembele, Mbappe, and Vinicius Junior, a member of Real, will also be competing for the 2025 award, but the final on Sunday could favor Yamal ahead of the ceremony’s oct in September.

What is the most recent development for Ronaldo’s team?

Ronaldo’s future as a player and whether he would compete in the upcoming FIFA Club World Cup in the United States have been the focus of much discussion heading into the UEFA Nations League’s final three games.

Lionel Messi will lead the host nation’s Inter Miami, who will face Egyptian side Al Ahly on June 14, in a new name and 32 teams for the annual international club competition.

Following a social media post from the front after the final day of the Saudi Pro League, Ronaldo’s time at Al Nasr in the tournament appears to be over.

Where will Ronaldo go from here next? A number of participants in the Club World Cup are being linked to a move for a player who continues to make headlines internationally. This would give FIFA’s desperate attempt to boost the competition.

What transpired between Portugal and Spain last time?

In their final encounter of the Nations League group stage, Spain defeated Portugal 1-0 in a match in 2022 to claim a victory.

In the 88th minute of the match, Alvaro Morata scored the only goal of the game at the Estadio Municipal de Braga.

Portugal and Spain square off in a head-to-head match

Although this will be Yamal and Ronaldo’s first game together, the on-field conflict between Spain and Portugal dates back to a friendly in 1921.

In the overall series of 17 of the 34 matches, Spain won with a score of 2-1 in December of that year.

Portugal have only won six games against their neighbors, the last of which was a friendly in 2010.

Six of the seven subsequent games ended in draws.

In the 2023 Nations final, who did Spain defeat?

After drawing one goalless in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in June 2023, Spain defeated Croatia 5-4 on penalties in the 2021 edition of the tournament.

France, who they face in Thursday’s second semifinal, defeated the Spaniards 2-1 in the 2021 final. Their victory in 2023 put an 11-year search for silverware to an end.

In the inaugural final, Portugal defeated who?

In the 2019 final, Portugal defeated the Netherlands 1-0.

The Portuguese won the game on their own soil at Porto’s Estadio do Dragao, and Goncalo Guedes scored the only goal of the match in the 60th minute.

Possible lineups for Portugal and Spain:

Potential Portugal XI: Diogo Costa, Joao Neves, Ronaldo, Inacio, Mendes, Ruben Neves, Bernardo Silva, Trincao, Fernandes, Neto, Ronaldo

The magician-in-chief is Donald Trump.

I believe that Trump is more aware of how to manipulate the squirrel-like attention spans of the new and “legacy” media to his advantage than any US president since Ronald Reagan.

Reagan and his skilled advisers almost exclusively relied on television to choreograph flattering set pieces to guide his retrograde plans and maneuver around a few prickly scandals.

Trump is well aware of the methods and methods to infuse himself into the American consciousness thanks to the “boob tube,” having established his ubiquitous star via “reality TV” and countless appearances on ephemeral “chat” shows.

Trump has still honed his signature trick, misdirection, using social media, which is now primarily Truth Social. He understands how to divert the public’s attention from what is important, just like any experienced illusionist.

His goals are twofold: to advance his revolutionary agenda and to conceal the harm it causes.

Trump dismissed the COVID-19 threat, pounded unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine, and even suggested using disinfectant as a potential remedy when a new, lethal virus emerged and spread quickly as the death toll grew.

Trump’s bizarre provocations were well intentioned and intended to halt and deflect a thorough examination of his administration’s slow, chaotic response.

Trump is aware that anger is the lifeblood of the digital era. He controls the tone and pace of public discourse by provoking conflict and controversy at a relentless rate.

Trump can change the conventional “news” narrative and use it with the aid of a cellphone, likely bearing the presidential seal, and a glint of inspiration.

He accomplishes this by flashing opulent, fleeting baubles to further his exclusive interests, while more pressing issues pass by unnoticed, like a passing cloud, causing the hard, complex stuff to fade into disrepair.

Trump is the equivalent of a 24/7 cable news outlet that, admitted or not, happily consumes content that the real cable news channels are addicted to.

So Trump pulled out of his top hat and created a fantastical “channel-changer” in the disconcerting face of Elon Musk’s untimely, abrupt split and a ferocious uproar in the Senate over his signature “big, beautiful” budget.

The president of the United States “reposted a baseless claim on Truth Social that former president Joe Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced with clones or robots,” according to NBC News.

An NBC correspondent was required to contact the White House to find out the following given that the president of the United States shared the “conspiracy theory” with his 10 million followers and, consequently, the rest of us:

First, was it “believed” that Biden had been put to death in 2020 by the US president.

Second, why did the head of state of the United States refute a claim that a Biden had been executed and had been a clone?

Let me assist NBC News and the dozens of reporters who felt compelled to pose the same absurd questions in search of “clarity” on the White House.

I can confidently say that Trump does not “believe” that Biden was executed in 2020 despite his, ah, bluster and eccentricities.

Trump trumpeted this absurdity to sway NBC News and other scribes who are focused on the most recent shiny object rather than to examine how his “big, beautiful” bill will dilute the US deficit and reduce the number of Americans who have health insurance.

I believe it is too easy and simplistic to dismiss Trump’s ability to “train” the world’s gaze as a “distraction” because we should have already figured out how to use it.

Trump’s weapons are much more common and pernicious. He doesn’t just distract; he rewrites the story in real time, making the serious seem trivial and the trivial seem epochal. Oh, and he already realized that the majority of political observers are much more enamored by personality than by policy.

Trump also acknowledges that power is not the only factor in the presidency. It involves stagecraft. He doesn’t care about accountability or nuance. He enjoys the spectacle. And it always triumphs over the spectacle.

Trump continues to beguile and enthral with his meticulous performances, grounded in the gravitational pull and opulent prestige of occupying the Oval Office.

The president’s point is repeated in the Beltway press.

By presidential decree, Trump made it known that the White House attorney and attorney general would look into allegations that Biden’s advisers “covered up” his “cognitive decline” and authorized him to approve important decisions without his knowledge or consent.

Biden, who expressed his anger on his part, claimed that he made the “decisions during my presidency” and that his calculated gambit was a “distraction” on Thursday.

The “investigation” follows a book that CNN host Jake Tapper co-authored that details Biden’s alleged waning mental capacity while in office.

Since, according to their claims, he and CNN previously poo-pooed reports of Biden’s faltering mind and body, Tapper has been accused of revising the record as a sop-wing personality.

The manufactured rant and the deepening, vitriolic rupture of Trump-Musk sex have, in contrast, made the reinstatement of Trump’s racist travel ban a secondary consideration.

It was once the subject of ferocious legal and moral opposition, and now there isn’t even a hint of resistance. This is yet another illustration of how Trump’s theatrics smother the dangerous intent hidden beneath the alluring noise.

How should I proceed?

A trustworthy newsroom must steer clear of Trump’s cynical schemes by doing everything in its power to avoid serving as marionettes.

That means abiding by the need to treat every insult, incendiary outburst as urgent or newsworthy. Whose interests are being served by this coverage, according to editors and producers?

Pause or make a refreshing pass if the response is Trump’s.

Journalists should focus on the truth rather than stunts. What is hidden behind the vibrant camouflage, in addition to patience and the discipline to pose another crucial question?

Detachment is not the antidote to manipulation; it is sharp, vigilant reporting of the president’s profound, human effects, not his antics.

The fourth estate can and must stop mistakenly interpreting the fireworks for the fire in its exhausting dance with Donald Trump.

President Donald Trump and adviser Elon Musk celebrated their efforts to slash federal spending before Musk stepped away from his White House work. Musk wore a black DOGE hat over a bruised right eye that he blamed on his young son’s punch. That was May 30 in the Oval Office. Days later, the two billionaires were punching at each other on the social media platforms they own.

Their fight began over federal tax and spending legislation, with Musk calling a Trump-backed bill “a disgusting abomination” and Trump saying he was “very disappointed” with Musk. Soon, Musk claimed credit for Trump and Republicans winning in 2024, and Trump threatened to cut off Musk’s companies’ federal contracts.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore.

This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.

Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.

The public display of animosity called into question the fate of months of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) work.

Under Musk’s oversight and with Trump’s approval, DOGE axed billions of dollars in grants for state health departments and scientific research. It gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers. It all but shuttered the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the decades-old department that provides food and healthcare to people in other countries.

Still, as Musk ended his work with DOGE, it was clear that the group’s cost-cutting achievements fell short of Musk’s goals. A week before Trump won his second term, Musk said he expected to cut “at least $2 trillion”, without identifying a timeframe for doing it. He later lowered that to $1 trillion.

But both figures were wildly unrealistic. Even if Musk could have eliminated every dollar of non-defence discretionary spending – everything from air traffic control, medical research, federal prosecutors and prisons to border control, US embassies and national parks – he wouldn’t have reached his $1 trillion goal.

As of early June, DOGE’s online “wall of receipts” accounting of federal dollars cut said that the government had cut $180 billion. But analyses by PolitiFact, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the conservative American Enterprise Institute showed that the tallies Musk provided were flawed. And total 2025 federal spending under Trump has continued to grow.

Nat Malkus, an education policy specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said DOGE’s cuts showed an “appetite for recklessness”, and its error and exaggeration-filled wall of receipts provided “ample grounds for scepticism” about its accuracy. “Beyond that, the receipts only cover a fraction of their actions, making their accomplishments and savings impossible to verify,” Malkus said.

Savings amount unclear

DOGE’s “wall of receipts” reported that the $180bn savings represented a combination of actions, including lease and grant cancellations, “fraud and improper payment deletion” and eliminating employees.

During their May 30 news conference, Musk predicted savings would rise to $1 trillion, but their public dispute made DOGE’s future more uncertain. A few top lieutenants had already departed; dozens of DOGE employees remained.

DOGE says its wall of receipts is incomplete: “We are working to upload all of our receipts in a digestible and transparent manner consistent with applicable rules and regulations,” the website says, calling its list “a subset of contract, grant, and lease cancellations, representing ~30 percent of total savings.”

And it has errors. For example, DOGE said it would save $740,457 by ending a lease that housed records for the Barack Obama Presidential Library. But the federal government had already planned to end that lease in 2025. The property’s leasing company told PolitiFact on May 30 that the government is still using the property and paying rent. If the government leaves before September, it will have to continue paying under the lease’s terms, unless another tenant is secured.

Some of DOGE’s contract and grant cancellations are being litigated, and the government may ultimately be required to fulfil them.

“Even for grants and contracts that DOGE cut, the claimed savings may never be realised,” Joshua Sewell, a federal budget expert at Taxpayers for Common Sense, said.

The $180bn figure was aspirational and projected, PolitiFact found.

“Itemised, verifiable cuts – those with receipts – are roughly half that amount,” said Dominik Lett, a budget policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Of those itemised cuts, there are numerous clerical errors and inflated savings values.”

Government officials did not respond to our questions about how many federal employees were cut. The New York Times reported that as of May 12, the government reduced its workforce by roughly 135,000, including cuts and buyouts. That amounts to a tiny portion of the 2.4 million federal workforce, with similarly modest savings in salaries. The Reuters news agency, counting early retirements in addition to buyouts and firings, said the tally was 260,000.

When 75,000 employees who took buyouts come off the books in October, that will save about $10bn a year, or 0.1 percent of federal spending, Jessica Riedl, an expert on the federal budget at the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote in an essay for The Atlantic. (Trump quoted the 75,000 figure during his May 30 news conference.) But the government could end up hiring contractors to perform some of that work, further shrinking those savings.

Not every agency or department faced widespread cuts. The Justice Department’s staffing was reduced by about 1 percent, The New York Times found. But nearly all employees were cut at USAID and AmeriCorps. Nearly half of the Education Department’s staff were cut.

Federal government spending continues to rise. In April 2025, total spending was $594bn, $27bn more than in April 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That’s a 5 percent increase. The largest spending decrease – $17bn – came in the Department of Education, which Trump promised to eliminate. But Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid outlays rose, as did some department spending, including in agriculture and defence.

Some of DOGE’s line items show savings of zero dollars, which a White House spokesperson said means that the money has been spent but won’t be renewed, such as for news subscriptions or training. It also showed some negative values for grants; a State Department spokesperson said they were caused by an input error that had since been corrected, although it was still on the site as of about noon ET (16:00 GMT) on June 5.

It’s unclear whether DOGE’s spending cuts will be permanent because federal law requires the executive branch to send proposed cuts, known as “rescissions”, to Congress for approval. The White House on June 3 sent a $9.4bn package of rescission cuts to Congress that includes cutting foreign aid.

“DOGE can kill projects, but the spending doesn’t become savings until Congress votes to ‘unspend’ the money,” Malkus said.

DOGE also increased some government costs, such as those incurred when defending against lawsuits.

DOGE abruptly cut programmes but failed to find mass fraud

DOGE left no state untouched, according to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress. It terminated leases and grants to health departments, universities and volunteer programmes across the country.

DOGE listed terminations of hundreds of millions of dollars in state health department grants, which represented some of the group’s biggest “savings”. These cuts targeted health departments in states including Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

The administration said the cuts mostly affected money used for the COVID-19 pandemic response.

Twenty-three states challenged the cuts in a lawsuit that argued the move caused states “tremendous chaos” including “immediate harm to public health initiatives and the termination of large numbers of state and local public health employees and contractors”. In mid-May, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction requiring the federal government to release the frozen funding.

“These funds support state and local health departments in combatting infectious diseases, as well as offering mental health services and funding addiction treatment programmes,” said Lynn Sutfin, a state Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson in Michigan, one of the state plaintiffs.

Other cuts included nearly $400m in AmeriCorps grants, resulting in the terminations of more than 32,000 AmeriCorps members and volunteers, and the historic gutting of USAID, the nation’s federal international humanitarian and development arm.

One local AmeriCorps programme, Serve Louisiana, filed a lawsuit to stop cuts to its $700,000 grant that aimed to place 37 workers with Louisiana nonprofits, including a food bank, a library and Boys and Girls Clubs, through August. As of June 2, the lawsuit was ongoing.

“Our nonprofit partners are now scrambling to adapt without the help they counted on,” Serve Louisiana Executive Director Lisa Moore said.

USAID programmes aimed to reduce hunger and disease and promote democracy globally. In fiscal year 2024, USAID made up 0.3 percent of the federal budget. Weeks after Trump’s inauguration, DOGE froze nearly all of USAID’s spending and terminated nearly all employees.

Musk boasted on February 3 that DOGE had fed “USAID into the wood chipper”, and two weeks later he wielded a chainsaw at a conservative political event to symbolise what he said was his attack on federal bureaucracy.

USAID’s dismantling had sprawling global effects.

In Ukraine – the largest recipient of USAID funds since Russia’s 2022 invasion – regional media outlets lost funding and medical charities shuttered programmes that screened for and treated tuberculosis and HIV, NPR reported.

US diplomats in Malawi said US funding cuts to the United Nations World Food Programme increased criminal activity, sexual violence and human trafficking in a large refugee camp, ProPublica reported. American embassy officials in Kenya said funding cuts to refugee camp food programmes led to violent demonstrations, ProPublica said.

People also died because of the chaotic aid disruptions, according to Al Jazeera, NPR, The Associated Press, and other news organisations.

The consequences are still unspooling.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that up to four million people in Africa might die from treatable diseases without USAID funding. Former USAID officials told Reuters that, because of the cuts, food rations worth $98m that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are decaying in warehouses and some are likely to be destroyed. The World Health Organization cautioned in March that USAID cuts could trigger a global increase in tuberculosis cases and deaths.

Musk and Trump said that DOGE would ferret out fraud, too. Government reports predating Trump’s current term show fraud is a real problem, but so far DOGE has not proven that it has recently uncovered mass fraud.