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November 11, 2025
How blessed are we to be able to witness generational, all-time great players go at each other throughout the same era? How blessed are we to see greatness not only in their prime, but also throughout an entire career marked by longevity and undeniable greatness? How often do we see sportsmen evolve and continue to strive beyond their formative years?
Cristiano Ronaldo is such a person. Say what you will about his position in the pantheon of greats as far as listing goes. Say what you will about his personality, his confidence in himself, or his role as the focal point of teams of historical importance. Ronaldo has long transcended the world of football as we understand it. He is one of the most famous people in the world. As we will discuss, he is, arguably, the most marketable and famous person on the planet, and has been like this for the better part of a decade. People still flock to his personality, family, and influence over popular culture. They do so even now, in the twilight of his playing career. He simply refuses to go away because Cristiano Ronaldo does not slow down.
Cristiano Ronaldo - Inner demons
As long as he has his legs and wits about him, Cristiano Ronaldo will never back down from chasing the shadow of his own greatness. There is no place under the sun for any piece of magnanimous grace other than his own — this is what his mentality boils down to. He is Cristiano, and all of us look at his influence with a sense of wonder.
We are at the end of 2025, and we can make all sorts of retrospective analyses. However, Cristiano does not, and will not stop soon. As such, why not talk about his effect, on and off the pitch?
At the moment of writing this article, Cristiano Ronaldo is approximately 3 months away from turning 41. In general, with athletes, the age of 30, which is the age at which men enter their physical prime, is a point when the strain on their bodies starts to impact their athletic abilities. It’s something akin to the beginning of the end of a career, especially if it began really early.
However, Cristiano Ronaldo was still winning trophies with Real Madrid, and only a breakdown in the relationship with the club made it so that he eventually left the club for an enormous fee. He conquered the Premier League under Sir Alex Ferguson, he conquered the Spanish La Liga top flight under different coaches, and became one of the most decorated players in the world.
In 2018, when he was already 33, he moved to Juventus, the biggest club in Italy, where he also conquered the Serie A, en route to a total of 98 official appearances and an immense number of 81 goals.
Even as that situation broke down because of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, he came during a second stint with the Red Devils, one that has ended acrimoniously because of management characters that have proven disastrous for the clubs and who have long gone from Manchester.
After the 2022 World Cup, during which he was close to turning 38, he proved that he still has strong legs underneath him. However, when others zig, Cristiano recognises the opportunity to zag, which brought him as a trailblazer to Al-Nassr and the Saudi Pro League: a trend that has attracted numerous stars to the Arabian Peninsula.
The conclusion from this short presentation is that Cristiano Ronaldo does not operate on a regular human timeline. He may not have the same burst of athleticism, but his endurance, savvy understanding of the game, and understanding of who he is both on and off the pitch showcase that, while not indestructible, he defies a normal human or athletic timeline.
If we are to quantify the Cristiano Ronaldo effect from the point of view of his social media following, he is the most popular person on the planet. The total number of followers that he boasts across all platforms exceeds 1 billion, and he surely doesn’t need bots to drive up his figures and engagement.
Once people learned the name of his new club in Saudi Arabia, the club’s Instagram account’s followers soared from under 1 million to over 10 million in just a short amount of time, with the current number exceeding 28 million followers. There were over 10 million social media interactions with this particular subject.
This is also a way in which people have interacted with his signing. For example, his unveiling registered billions of onlookers online, everybody being curious about where exactly he ended up.
As for stadium attendance, a research paper from November 2023 about Ronaldo’s effect on attendance unveiled that his effect was an increase of over 15%, which circa half a long point in home attendance.
Betting markets, especially when it comes to odds, are prone to all kinds of volatility when there are seismic shifts. Football is even more of a team sport than others, such as those in which there is a transformative player who coordinates the game (a quarterback in American football), or in a game with fewer players on the playing field.
However, there are rarely any players with the kind of value that Cristiano Ronaldo has. He has scored so many goals throughout his career precisely because he has always been savvy and dangerous. He used to do it by sheer athleticism and skill, but his current game mostly translates into intelligent positioning and a refined instinct for goal.
Per the odds collected and compared throughout the years by BetBrain, we are seeing that historical data tells us what we could’ve already guessed: odds shorten when he joins a team and he’s on the pitch. Moreover, live betting, which has gained real traction only in this latter part of his career, still sees odds be very volatile because, every time, he seems in tune with the pace of the match, or if he touches the ball in a dangerous situation despite being relatively quiet the rest of the game, he can flip the match upside down.
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There’s also career-related oddsmaking. Previously, when there was smoke about him not being exactly satisfied with what’s going on at Real and Juvents, and especially during his second United stint, betting markets were clamouring with odds on which his next club would be.
As a result, Cristiano Ronaldo is a one-man odds-shifting machine that will always get the books on their toes.
Back in 2019, when a scientific report of Cristiano Ronaldo’s effect started to make the rounds on the internet during his debut season with Juventus, numbers have shown that he was one of the greatest big game scorers of all time, especially at the club level. His ability to lock in and score during injury time, or in knockout phases of a tournament in competitions like the Champions League, is an amazing achievement.
His percentage of scores per game, not to mention the gravity that a player of his calibre still has on opposing defences, is what allows him to still be an impactful player. He has always been a transformative player due to his combination of individual skill, positioning, and eye for the goal.
Cristiano Ronaldo next game for Portugal is on November 13, against Ireland, for the World Cup Qualifiers. You can watch Ireland vs Portugal, Moldova vs Italy, France vs Ukraine, England vs Serbia, Poland vs Netherlands and Luxembourg vs Germany, all matches provided from our live soccer game pages.
Portugal next game:
Ireland vs Portugal kick-off time (13-11-2025):
Beijing (China) | UTC/GMT+8: 03:45
India (New Delhi) | UTC/GMT+5.30: 01:15
Saudi Arabia (Riyadh) | UTC/GMT+3: 22:45
Spain (Madrid) | UTC/GMT+1: 20:45
Portugal and England (Lisbon/London) | UTC/GMT+0: 19:45
Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) | UTC/GMT-3: 16:45
New York (United States) | UTC/GMT-4: 15:45
Los Angeles (United States) | UTC/GMT-7: 12:45
Sources: ronaldo7.net / reasearchgate.net / berkeley.edu
