Cristiano Ronald has been crowned a billionaire, as he becomes the world’s first football player to attain such status in a team sports.
According to the report obtained from Forbes, Cristiano Ronald who is a former Real Madrid, but now plays for the Italian side, Juventus, earned $105 million before taxes and fees in the past year, landing him at No. 4 on the 2020 Forbes Celebrity 100. He is one spot above his top rival in the sport, Lionel Messi, and making him the first soccer player in history to earn $1 billion.
The 35-year-old striker is only the third athlete to hit the mark while still playing following Tiger Woods, who did it in 2009 on the back of his long term endorsement deal with Nike and Floyd Mayweather in 2017, who’s made most of his income from a cut of pay-per-view sales for his boxing matches, Forbes report added.
Ronaldo made $650 million during his 17 years on the pitch and is expected to reach $765 million in career salary after his current contract ends in June 2022. Messi, who began playing at the senior level three years after Ronaldo, has earned a total of $605 million in salary since 2005. The only team athlete to even come within striking distance of those figures was former New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez, who retired in 2016 after 22 years in MLB having earned $450 million in salary. Not even soccer legend David Beckham came close, ending his career with total earnings of $500 million, half of which came from off-pitch endorsements.
“Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the greatest players of all time, in the world’s most popular sport, in an era when football has never been so rich,” said Sporting Intelligence’s Nick Harris, whose Global Sports Salaries Survey ranks teams worldwide based on total salary expense. “He’s box office.”
Ronaldo and Messi’s head-to-heads heated up in Spain’s La Liga in 2009, where Ronaldo played for Real Madrid and Messi for Barcelona. Their faceoffs on the pitch ignited a nine-year battle for bragging rights as the best and top-paid in the sport, a highly personal tit-for-tat that had them re-negotiating contracts in lockstep and monopolizing the game’s highlight reel.
(Forbes)