Cristiano Ronaldo earned $105 million after taxes and fees in the past year despite taking a pay-cut at Juventus, landing him at No. 4 on the 2020 Forbes Celebrity 100, one spot above his top rival in the sport, Lionel Messi, and making him the first soccer player in history to earn $1 billion in salary across his playing career.
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, who did it in 2017 and has made most of his income from a cut of pay-per-view sales for his boxing matches.
Ronaldo, the first to reach the earnings milestone in a team sport, has made $650 million on the pitch during his 17 years as a pro and is expected to reach $765 million in career salary with his current contract, which 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 Major League Baseball 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-the-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 2009 in Spain’s La Liga, 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.
The rivalry was as entertaining as it was profitable, coming just as clubs around the world were seeing soaring attendance and an influx of television money. The two were perfectly matched for battle, on and off the pitch: Ronaldo perfected a shirtless, stylized showmanship while Messi played the quiet game, always a tad unkempt and as prolific a scorer as he was a wingman. Ronaldo strutted after every goal. Messi was a master at thanking his teammates.
Both backed it up. Barcelona won La Liga’s title six times and two Champions Leagues trophies with Messi on the squad. Real Madrid won the Spanish title twice and the Champions League four times with Ronaldo. During their years in the league, each player nabbed the Ballon d’Or (soccer’s MVP award) four times, and El Clásico, the nickname for their clubs’ fierce clashes, was a record-setting television event worldwide.
But when it comes to leveraging celebrity, it has been no contest. Guided by Jorge Mendes of Gestifute, one of the world’s most powerful agents, Ronaldo has amassed an ever-growing following of fans and consumers drawn to his poster-boy good looks, his trend-setting hair styles, his impeccable fashion sense and, lately, his softer side as a family man whose toddlers pop up on his social media posts.
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