According to the business channel Bloomberg, Cristiano Ronaldo has become the first football billionaire, and some, estimating his current wealth at $1.4 billion. Not bad for the son of a cook and a gardener from Madeira. But Cristiano is very angry. He thinks that his Saudi club, Al-Nassr, is not spending as much money as their rivals and so angry was he that he went on strike, missing their crunch game against Al-Riyadh. I have no idea how the game went in the absence of their preening geriatric superstar but I suspect there is very little sympathy pretty well anywhere for the great man, who turns 41 on Thursday.
Ronaldo is generally regarded as one of the greatest footballers of all time. Even grizzled old cynics like me who can’t abide the bloke cannot ignore the evidence of our own eyes and indeed the history books. And given his former greatness as a footballer, it would be foolish to complain about the fact it has made him very rich. He doesn’t keep it all to himself, either, and is well known for his generosity to good causes, but how much is enough?
As well as being worth a trifling $1.4 billion, Ronald trousers an additional $3.7m a week, tax free, from his Saudi paymasters, an annual salary approaching $200m. I’d imagine he also takes home a large fortune for image rights, advertising, merch and Christ alone knows what else. It is hard for someone like me, who thinks £50 is a large sum of money – I do and it is – to get my head around it all. Unless I am very much mistaken, his hourly rate, 24/7 is over $22,000. Not even some of the plumbers up our way can get away with that. But what will he do with it all?
I know what I’d probably do: die very quickly in a drunken stupor, having consumed much of the world’s supply of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc on a selection of beaches from the Maldives to the West Indies. Money would be no object. You’d do well to spend a fraction of it before you shuffled off your mortal coil. I am not sure if old Cristiano believes in God but he certainly has more money than him. The bad news is that all this extreme, some might say obscene, wealth can’t prevent him shuffling off his own mortal coil.
The excellent football writer John Nicholson addressed the money in football in his book Can We Have Our Football Back? He notes that some players earn as much as £70,000 a week (actually, many earn much more than that), adding that actually £70,000 a year is generally regarded as a decent salary. It certainly is regarded by me to be a decent salary since the best I ever earned was just over a third of that figure. I was such a terrible footballer, I had to pay to play the game, even when I made a late appearance as an ineffective substitute. Hell, if I’d been a really good footballer – and we can all dream – I’d have happily played for, say, Liverpool for the minimum wage, although I guess my agent, my Mr 10%, might have had something to say about the £1.22 a week he’d be taking from me. But that was the thing: I absolutely loved playing, I didn’t mind paying to do it. I guess that’s because football was never my job.
You can’t blame Ronaldo for taking the money that’s on offer. If someone offers to pay you $3.7 million every week, tax free, in a second rate, at best, standard of football, are you really going to say: “Well, hang on: that’s far too much. Can you pay me a little less?” If Ronaldo’s agent said to Al-Nassr’s wage department that the going rate to enjoy the services of his client was $3.7m a week and they shook hands, it’s their look out. But I can’t help thinking this is a bad look.
We have a not much smaller version of the same thing in the English Premier League where, for example, Liverpool’s Mo Salah is believed to earn somewhere around £1m a week. Not $s but £s. Obviously, Salah is an elite talent, but even the Prem’s journeymen are likely to become millionaires in a very short space of time. I cannot find the definitive figure but it is widely believed the average Prem player earns over £2m a year. No wonder so many of them give so generously to charity and set up their own foundations. Heaven forbid that they are tax deductible.
Ultimately, it’s all our fault, the mug punters who pay for the match tickets, buy the merch and pay the subscriptions to Sky and TNT. The gravy train exists because we allow it to. And we cannot be surprised when the elite players at the top, and those who are shadows of their elite selves, like Ronaldo, can look at us in the eye and say: too much ain’t enough.
These days, I get by on a modest income, from which I happily pay tax for the greater good. Cristiano Ronaldo, heading for his second billion, pays no tax at all on his income. I make charitable donations and carry out voluntary work for charities on top of paying tax, Ronaldo does the same but without paying tax. He and I both came from humble backgrounds, one of whom has been incredibly successful. But only one of us remembers where we came from and he isn’t Cristiano Ronaldo. He will be remembered as a great footballer, but more than that as a greedy bastard. I don’t expect he will give a toss about that but in a world where being respected matters then maybe he should. “No one loves me, I don’t care.” Hmm. Not sure about that.
