Why did Cristiano Ronaldo miss Diogo Jota's funeral?

Many Portuguese and Liverpool players were present at the funeral.

Cristiano Ronaldo, who failed to attend Diogo Jota’s memorial on Saturday, received a lot of criticism. However, his sister opened up about why the forward couldn’t come to the funeral.

Jota, 28, and his brother, Andre Silva, 25, who were inside a Lamborghini, passed away in an early-morning accident in northern Spain on Thursday. Jota was buried in the Gondomar cemetery in Portugal on Saturday afternoon.

The catastrophe happened eleven days after Diogo Jota married her childhood sweetheart, Rute Cardoso, who is also twenty-eight and the mother of his two kids, Dinis, four, and Duarte, two, as well as his eight-month-old daughter, Mafalda.

The Portuguese publication Record claims that Cristiano Ronaldo might have chosen not to go because of the sensitive nature of his father’s passing, Jose Diniz Aveiro, who passed away in September 2005 when Ronaldo was only 20 years old.

After learning of Jota’s death, Ronaldo reportedly chose not to travel because he did not want his presence to overshadow the significance of people honouring Jota and his brother.

What was the reaction of Ronaldo’s sister?

Although the Al-Nassr forward has received criticism for being absent from some quarters, his sister Katia publicly defended him on social media.

Taking via Instagram, she wrote:

”When my father died, in addition to the pain of loss, we had to deal with a flood of cameras and curious onlookers at the cemetery and everywhere we went.” 

”And attention was not what it is today in terms of access…At no time were we (the children) able to leave the chapel; it was only possible at the time of the burial, such was the commotion.” 

”At the funeral, there were presidents, coaches of the national team at the time, such as Luís Filipe Scolari, etc. I don’t remember seeing any of them. And they certainly greeted me. The pain blinded me.” 

”About pain/family and real support… You will never know what it means until you go through it. If someone sends me a message criticising anything my brother does, I will block it (completely ignore it), that is, they will only do it once.”

‘It’s getting tiring. The fanaticism. The criticism for nothing, I repeat nothing… Sick society… We all have families.”

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