Cristiano Ronaldo scored twice for Portugal before becoming the last of the football superstars to arrive in France for Friday’s start of Euro 2016.
With the host nation under a state of emergency over feared terror attacks, strict security has greeted Ronaldo and other headline players as well as the hundreds of thousands of foreign fans gathering for the month-long, 51-match fiesta.
This will be the first 24-team European Championship, a month-long marathon a far cry from the eight-nation event when France with Michel Platini were last hosts in 1984.
France launch the tournament with a Group A game against Romania on Friday. Les Bleus remain the last host country to lift the trophy — named after a Frenchman, Henri Delaunay — and also won the World Cup as hosts in 1998, when Didier Deschamps was the captain.
Now he is the coach of a side looking to lift the spirits of a nation beset by social unrest and fears of a repeat of the Paris attacks last November. The tension has made some players nervous however.
“I would like to concentrate fully on football during the Euro, and I would feel much better if my family is not sitting in the stadium,” said Germany’s Jerome Boateng, who has told his wife and children to stay away from the country in case of an attack.
He was in the Germany team that was playing France when suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Stade de France on the night of the November 13 attacks that killed 130 people around Paris.
France has ramped up the presence of security forces but fans will still come in vast numbers to attend matches from Lens in the north of the country to Nice on the Cote d’Azur and the Stade de France, which will host the final on July 10.