According to Dave Fraser of The Sun, Portugese soccer great Cristiano Ronaldo has become only the third professional sports athlete ever to crack the billion-dollar mark in total earnings. He joins basketball great Michael Jordan of Brooklyn, NY, golf legend Tiger Woods of Cypress, CA and boxing superstar Floyd Mayweather of Grand Rapids, MI, on this exclusive list.
Ronaldo has made $650 million through soccer and $350 million through endorsements. Even though Ronaldo has currently reached the billion-dollar mark in career earnings, his income over the last year of $105 million, only ranked second in the world. Tennis icon Roger Federer of Switzerland ranked number one according to Forbes Magazine, at $106.3 million.
Ronaldo’s total earnings of exactly $1 billion, is less than Jordan ($2.1 billion), Woods, who has a career total of $1.5 billion total earnings and Mayweather at $1.1 billion. Woods’s current net worth is $800 million, and Mayweather’s current net worth is $505 million. It should be noted that Mayweather is using his wealth to honorable use this week as he is paying for George Floyd’s funeral.
Ronaldo is the first soccer player to earn an income of $1 billion. The remarkable income has come despite some legal issues along the way. In July of 2017, Ronaldo was fined 18.8 million Euros for fraudulently evading 15 million Euros in taxes from 2011 to 2014 according to the Associated Press. He also paid a woman $375,000 in a non-disclosure settlement following a rape allegation in Las Vegas in 2018 from an incident in 2009 according to Emanuella Grinberg of CNN.
Currently, Ronaldo is a star forward for Juventus. At 35 years of age, he has 42 goals in 53 games with the most recognizable Italian soccer franchise since 2018.
Throughout his career, Ronaldo has also put up fantastic numbers playing professionally in England and Spain, as well as his home country of Portugal at the international level. He has 84 career goals in 196 games with Manchester United from 2003 to 2009 in the English Premier League, an astonishing 311 goals in 292 games with Real Madrid from 2009 to 2018 in La Liga, and 99 goals in 164 games with Portugal since 2003.
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