Cristiano Ronaldo In The New Media Ecosystem – OpEd

By Ellis Cashmore

In February 2025, during a Spanish television interview, Cristiano Ronaldo declared, “I’m the best player in football history. I haven’t seen anyone better than me.” Was this a gauche, egotistical indiscretion or the knowing remark of a consummate self-publicist with brilliant intuition for grabbing the world’s attention?

Ronaldo is an athlete par excellence, and his prodigious skills are the reason we first knew of him. But there have been other exceptional football players, all of whom distinguished themselves as the world’s best. Pelé in the 1960s, Johan Cruyff in the 1970s, Diego Maradona in the 1980s, Lionel Messi in the 2010s: Each redefined what seemed possible in their era. Ronaldo probably does not eclipse them in skills. What makes him singular is less what he does with the ball and more the way he has adapted to a media ecosystem fundamentally different from the one that shaped his predecessors and one that’s still morphing.

A niche of his own

No one disputes the plaudits and prizes Ronaldo has won in his 23-year career. From his early years at Sporting Lisbon to Manchester United, Real Madrid, Juventus, a return to United and his current club, Al-Nassr in Saudi Arabia, his career has been defined by superlatives and record-breaking achievements. Over 1,100 professional goals, Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions League victories, five Ballons d’Or (the highest honor in association football) and consistently high-quality performances at international tournaments have validated his athletic preeminence. Yet he has combined these achievements with 14 red cards in professional football, including a recent one in November 2025 when playing for Portugal against the Republic of Ireland. 

FIFA’s decision to commute his mandatory three-match suspension to a single game (an extraordinary act of leniency for an offense normally punished without exception) underscores just how singular his status has become. The rationale was never stated explicitly, but it seems obvious: Ronaldo is not another player to be disciplined. His presence lifts broadcast audiences, commercial interest and international attention. FIFA chose to protect that asset. Purists see it as an affront to fairness. Yet the episode contains a deeper truth: Ronaldo now occupies a niche of his own, where regulations bend to accommodate him.

$4 million a week and worth every penny

“Ronaldo is the only foreign player worth what he earns because of the global exposure he brings to the league and the country,” said former Saudi Sports Minister Prince Abdullah bin Mosaad in December 2025. Ronaldo’s annual salary at the time was $211 million, or $4 million a week. It was an unusually frank acknowledgment of where Ronaldo’s real value lay: Not in scoring goals or winning trophies, but in drawing “global exposure.”

Exposure — by which I take the Prince to mean media attention — has become a kind of currency. Its social effects are tangible: Status, credibility, influence and, of course, money. Saudi Arabia has plenty of the latter but craves the first three. Ronaldo has all four and, through cultural osmosis, transfers them to the kingdom. His public persona is enacted and reproduced with every appearance, every goal, every celebration; every social media post, sponsorship, endorsement, charitable gesture and interview. Everything he does and says in public is covered by the media, making his presence unmissable.

In 2024, Ronaldo became the first celebrity to reach one billionfollowers across all social media platforms. He surpasses the global fan base of most football clubs and leagues. Engagement metrics, including likes, shares and comments, translate directly into cultural leverage. Each post, whether promoting a product or simply capturing a moment, is simultaneously entertainment, advertisement and signal. This gives Ronaldo unprecedented exposure for an athlete and helps justify his salary at Al-Nassr.

His Al-Nassr contract is only one of his income streams. Ronaldo has become a multifaceted enterprise independent of his on-field endeavors. He maintains a lifetime $1 billion deal with Nike, endorses products from Herbalife to TAG Heuer and lends his name to CR7-branded hotels, gyms, underwear and lifestyle merchandise. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and digital collectibles extend the brand into virtual economies. Sponsorships and partnerships are not incidental to football; they are part of the Ronaldo performance, each reinforcing his presence, or, more accurately, his omnipresence.

A Netflix documentary, a recent visit to the White House, endless international interviews and, of course, football create the impression that Ronaldo is near-ubiquitous. Controversies such as disciplinary incidents or personal-life events that might harm others’ reputations often turn into a kind offelix culpa for Ronaldo — missteps that, instead of diminishing him, circulate as fresh currency. In 2020, he became the first active team-sport athlete to surpass $1 billion in career earnings.

Digital transition

Ronaldo’s ascent coincided with the most significant shift in sports media consumption since television emerged in the 1950s. Over the past 20 years, the grammar of viewing has changed from a linear, nonparticipative form of spectating to a multidimensional, interactive, endlessly shareable experience. (Linear media refers to scheduled broadcasts chosen by the broadcaster, not the viewer.)

The shift is no longer approaching: it is here. Generation Z and late Millennials do not necessarily watch sports when channels air events. They use phones and tablets to access a continuous stream of clips, memes, highlights, reactions and dialogue across several platforms. This is more than viewing: it is engagement, an interactive feed unfolding in real time among millions of simultaneous observers.

The prologue to this shift was 2005, when YouTube launched. At first, few foresaw its potential. Today, YouTube viewers watch over 100 million hours of sports videos every day. By the early 2010s, Twitter had become a global exchange where fans shared opinions and reactions. Then in 2016, TikTok crystallized the micromoment: a celebration, an injury, a training ground spat; each became a global event.

Direct-to-consumer streaming from DAZN to Amazon Prime accelerated the move away from orthodox sports broadcasting. Disney’s recent negotiations to stream La Liga in the UK and Ireland signal yet another break in the old model. The idea of watching sport exclusively on a big screen is passé. The iPhone has been with us since 2007.

As a result, athletes no longer appear only in scheduled broadcasts. Their presence becomes serial, fluid and continuous. The athlete exists in multiple modes at once: Physically on the pitch, visually on Instagram, narratively on YouTube, commercially on sponsorship platforms, memetically on TikTok and symbolically through fan-created content.

This is where Ronaldo becomes distinct from even the most illustrious athletes who came before him. The arc of his career coincided with the transformation of the media environment. The post-2010 ecosystem wants and rewards perpetual visibility. Did Ronaldo intuitively understand this? Or was he coached by advertisers, clubs and corporations? Was his boast (“I’m the best player in football history”) a careless slip or a calculated flourish?

360° Global exposure

Ronaldo might have been optimized for the digital age. Not just because he conjures clip-friendly moments such as gravity-defying headers and free kicks that George Balanchine might have choreographed, but because he contrives to pull in the media even by doing nothing. Moments entirely outside football have repeatedly renewed his visibility: the 2009 Las Vegas rape allegation that circulated globally for years without a conviction; the Coca-Cola incident at Euro 2020, when a momentary gesture at a press conference wiped billions from the drink company’s share price; and the 2022 Piers Morgan interview, a piece of celebrity theater that dominated news cycles far beyond sport. Even the museum devoted to Ronaldo in Madeira, the misbegotten sculpture, the Instagram follower milestones and his move to Saudi Arabia — reported less as a football transfer than a “homecoming” — have kept him in the media’s scope.

Ronaldo generates global exposure on a scale few institutions, let alone individuals, can match. What distinguishes him further is how he has expanded his visibility beyond football’s natural boundaries. His Instagram following — the largest in the world — is not made up only of football fans. His audience is demographically different from those of Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé: broader, more diverse, far less dependent on his football. This is why, in 2022, he could transfer to Saudi Arabia (then a distant outpost of football) at 37 and retain, and probably actually expand, his global presence.

His club, Al-Nassr, gains the world’s attention not because Ronaldo scores goals, but because he appears. Remember the ex-Saudi Sports Minister’s comment on Ronaldo’s value being measured in terms of  “the global exposure he brings.” In digital culture, visibility is not a by-product; it is the product.

They say success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan. Success on the scale of Ronaldo doesn’t have a single origin: It is the result of the efflorescence of global sports broadcasting in the 2000s and the myriad changes in the media landscape that made some athletes 360° global celebrities. Nike, TAG Heuer and the other brands he endorses have positioned him expertly, so it’s impossible for him to go unnoticed. Collectively, they are the ecosystem in which the Ronaldo brand thrives. 

[Ellis Cashmore’s Celebrity Culture is published by Routledge]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

• About the author: Ellis Cashmore is the author of The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Celebrity Culture and other books. He is a professor of sociology who has held academic positions at the University of Hong Kong, the University of Tampa and Aston University. His first article for Fair Observer was an obituary for Muhammad Ali in 2016. Since then, Ellis has been a regular contributor on sports, entertainment, celebrity culture and cultural diversity. Most recently, timelines have caught his fancy and he has created many for Fair Observer.
• Source: This article was published by Fair Observer