Undeniably, Cristiano Ronaldo, the striker currently playing for Al Nassr Club in the Saudi Arabian National Championship (Saudi Pro League), and Lionel Messi, the star of Inter Miami, are symbols of contemporary football. While Ronaldo is considered to be talented by hard work, Messi rose to the top thanks to his natural ability. In total, Messi and Ronaldo have won a total of 13 Golden Balls. A number that is enough to see that both are the greatest players of their generation. With the level of superstars, of course Ronaldo and Messi also make more money than others. This is clearly shown in the list of the 10 highest-earning athletes in history recently published by the website Sportico.
“Our published results are based on analysis with industry experts and historical media data, such as Forbes and Sports Illustrated. The amount of money each athlete earns is based on salary, bonuses, advertising, image royalties, income from social network interactions…”, Sportico website representative shared, “The inflation factor is also we take into account here.” Leading the list is the legend of the American professional basketball tournament (NBA), Michael Jordan, who earned a total of 3.75 billion USD, while in second place is golfer Tiger Woods, who pocketed 2.66 billion USD. .
Two names that attract the special attention of fans, especially soccer fans, on the money chart of the website Sportico are Portuguese striker Ronaldo and Argentine star Messi. If you look at the order, you can clearly see that Ronaldo has surpassed Messi. While Ronaldo ranked third with inflation-adjusted earnings of $1.92 billion, Messi ranked sixth with earnings of $1.67 billion.
It must be seen that Ronaldo is 39 years old this year. At that age, many of his peers had long since retired. Therefore, Ronaldo occupying the third position is a very admirable achievement, especially in the context that he left Europe to play football in Saudi Arabia in early 2023.
The reason Ronaldo has a stronger breakthrough than Messi is because he pocketed a total of 275 million USD in 2023. Of which, only the salary and bonuses that Ronaldo received from Saudi Arabia’s Al Nassr Club amounted to 215 million USD. . In addition, Ronaldo also earned about 60 million USD from advertising contracts with Nike, Herbalife, PokerStars, as well as hotel and clothing businesses…
As for Messi, he was out of breath before Ronaldo because his income last year was less than half of the Portuguese player’s. Accordingly, Messi only earned 130 million USD. In fact, if Messi agrees to go to Saudi Arabia, his income in 2023 will surpass that of Ronaldo.
However, Messi chose to go to America to join Inter Miami Club with a fairly… low salary. Specifically, Messi only received 54 million USD from the team chaired by former football player David Beckham. Interestingly, Becks himself is the third representative of football stars to appear in the Top 10 highest-earning athletes of all time. Specifically, Becks ranked 8th with an amount of money earned so far of 1.5 billion USD.
