There isn’t much football to report on at the moment, and that’s because there isn’t much football happening in general.
Unless you’re a fan of the leagues that are continuing to play fixtures in Belarus and Tajikistan - which we imagine accounts for very few of you - football doesn’t exist at the moment. We understand the reasons for that. Some things are more important than football, and the disease the world currently faces is one of them.
Without fixtures being played, even the world’s largest football clubs are feeling the financial impact of being told to stay at home and do nothing. Clubs that rely on income from fans paying for tickets are starting to notice the drain on their resources. Television money isn’t being paid out to clubs when televised football can’t be played, and so for the bigger clubs, that money is out of the window as well. The prospect of prize money coming in from successful league or European campaigns has also gone for the time being. That means the clubs no longer have an income, but the players and staff at those clubs still need paying.
Different leagues, clubs, and players are reacting to this situation in different ways. In England, Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson is attempting to agree a scheme with his fellow players where a percentage of wages can be donated to the country’s National Health Service. In Italy, the focus is more on saving enough money to keep clubs afloat than it is on funding other projects in the community, but the stars players of Juventus have bought into the idea - and Cristiano Ronaldo is leading the way.
With no football expected to be played between March and May, and Juventus having physios, coaches, administrative staff, and all the other less-celebrated employees to pay, the biggest expenditure that they could cut back on is the wages paid to their players. No player at Juventus is paid more than Ronaldo, but the Portugal captain is understood to have been the leader of an initiative that’s seen the first team agree to forego their salary until the end of May at the earliest. In Ronaldo’s case, that means giving up on €4m. When you add the wages of the first team together, the saving to the club is a staggering €113m over the course of those two months. It’s doubtful that Juventus were at risk of going bust anyway, but the reduction in financial pressure means that those on lower salaries at the club now have no fear of going unpaid during these fallow months.
Even though he’s giving up on what would be a huge amount of cash by anybody else’s measure, it’s not going to stop Ronaldo from passing a huge financial milestone by the end of 2020 - one that will put him ahead of his eternal rival Lionel Messi, and ahead of any other footballer who’s ever lived. Ronaldo is one of the most bankable names in the whole of sport. Sales of his shirts generate hundreds of millions of Euros every year. To many people, he’s the face of the whole sport - which explains why his image is used as marketing for the UK Online Slots ‘Striker Goes Wild.’ As he’s not name-checked in the game, it’s unclear whether the company who designed the online slots game got permission to use his likeness or not, but there’s no mistaking that famous silhouette. Whether it’s football, cologne, fashion, soft drinks, or online slots, if you have a product and you want to make money out of it, Ronaldo is usually the player you turn to. Because of that, he’s now set to become the world’s first billion-Euro player when his career income is taken into account.
According to the most recent figures available, which comes from an article that was published by Forbes earlier in the year, Ronaldo’s annual salary from Juventus comes in at sixty million Euros, but that’s only a fraction of his total earnings. When sponsorship and endorsements are added to that tally, he actually walks away with a figure that’s closer to €101m. As his earnings have consistently been around that level for the last ten seasons - and he’s occasionally earned more through appearing as a cover star for the ‘FIFA’ football games and other commercial endeavours, he’s now at the point of passing the billion-Euro mark before the end of the year. In doing so, he’ll become only the third still-active sportsman in history to reach the milestone. Only golfer Tiger Woods and boxer Floyd Mayweather have become billionaires during their careers, and Ronaldo has done it far faster than either one of them.
Ronaldo’s charitable generosity is well-known to all of those who follow his career, and so his willingness to put his salary aside and encourage his teammates to do the same doesn’t come as a surprise. He’s also likely to have been moved by the fact that he’s seen the impact of the illness at close quarters recently. His mother suffered a stroke earlier this year, and Ronaldo was alongisde her and the rest of his family in their native Madeira as she recuperated.
Ronaldo is, without a shadow of a doubt, the richest footballer who’s ever strapped on a pair of boots. He’s richer than Messi and Neymar, and will probably always remain so because of his business acumen. Despite his wealth, he still knows the difference between wrong and right, and his decision to lead a salary-sacrifice scheme has yet again shown that as well as having legendary talent, he also has legendary character. There will be trying times ahead for clubs and players in major leagues all over the world, but with people like Ronaldo and Jordan Henderson showing the way ahead, we can at least rely on the fact that we have players capable of leading by example to ensure that the sport is doing as much as it can to support the people who depend on it.
