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August 26, 2026
Ronaldo is already preparing for life after football, with club ownership, major investments and a global CR7 business portfolio giving him a clear route into his next career. As retirement approaches, his growing empire may prove just as important as the records he leaves behind...
The summer of 2026 has done a lot of tidying up in Cristiano Ronaldo's story. The World Cup he had already named as his last ended in the round of 16 on 6 July, a 1-0 defeat to Spain that still gave him three goals for the tournament, including his first ever in a World Cup knockout match. Five weeks later he married Georgina Rodríguez in a quiet civil ceremony in Cascais. And in an interview with Vogue published in mid-August, he said out loud what the calendar had been implying: this is "probably my last year in football." For most players of his standing, a sentence like that opens the most uncertain period of their lives. For Ronaldo it reads more like a scheduling note, because parts of the next career are already registered companies with his name on the shareholder documents.
🚨🇵🇹 Cristiano Ronaldo on possible retirement from international football: “I no longer make my decisions, or at least I no longer make many of them, while under emotional influence”.
— Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) July 3, 2026
“We will see after the World Cup”. pic.twitter.com/aNvz9P8rLy
Ronaldo has been unusually specific about what he won't do after playing. Coaching is out, and so, by his own account, is the executive corridor. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to be director of a club," he said in a Canal 11 interview around his 40th birthday. "If I can be a club owner, why would I be a manager, sporting director or CEO?" And then the line that set the direction: "I hope to have not just one club, but several clubs."
In February 2026 the first of them arrived. Through CR7 Sports Investments, Ronaldo bought 25 per cent of UD Almería, becoming a minority partner alongside the majority owner, Saudi Media Corporation, at a club already up and running in Spain's second tier. "It has been a longtime ambition of mine to contribute to football, beyond the pitch," he said when the deal was announced. He didn't found a club or launch a project from zero; he bought into a working operation, with an academy, a stadium in use and a squad under contract.
Nearly everything in his business life carries his own name or number. The hotels are Pestana CR7. The gyms are CR7 Fitness. The museum in Funchal is about him, the YouTube channel is called UR Cristiano, and the underwear has the monogram. As long as Ronaldo is playing, that's a strength; every match is a marketing event for the whole estate. The question his advisers will already be living with is what those letters are worth in the years when there's no fixture list attached to them.
The leisure trade he has been buying into offers one long-run answer. Genting, the casino group whose name Aston Villa wore across their shirts in the early 2010s, has outlived its founder by nearly two decades: Lim Goh Tong died in 2007, his son chaired the group for most of the years since, and a grandson is now positioned as the long-term successor.
Customers never noticed a handover, because the business had long since stopped depending on its founder being in the building. That's the transition the CR7 estate hasn't yet had to attempt, and the branding makes it harder, since the whole point of those initials is the person they belong to.
Even clearing that bar doesn't make an empire permanent. Genting closed Crockfords, its Mayfair flagship and one of the oldest casino names in London, in 2023, after almost two centuries of trading, when the economics of high-end London gaming stopped working. Owning things turns out to be the enjoyable half of the job; the discipline that eventually gets tested is deciding what to stop owning.
The scale of what needs to outlast him is considerable. In October 2025, Bloomberg's Billionaires Index made Ronaldo football's first billionaire, putting his fortune around $1.4 billion on the strength of the Al-Nassr contract and two decades of compounding off-pitch income.
Behind that number sit six Pestana CR7 hotels from Funchal to New York, the gym chain, the Insparya hair clinic group, a stake in Portuguese media group Medialivre reported at around 30 per cent, holdings in the porcelain house Vista Alegre, a padel venue in Lisbon and a majority of the events company Mussara. The YouTube channel set a Guinness World Record for subscribers gained in a day when it launched in August 2024. And little of it is new: the player who was calling 2014 "probably my best year ever" had already put his initials on a clothing line and opened that museum in Funchal.
The playing story still has one figure left in it. Ronaldo sits around 975 career goals, roughly 25 short of the 1,000 he has openly chased, with an Al-Nassr contract running to 2027 and a first Saudi league title, sealed in May, freshly on the honours list. The milestone may fall this season or be left agonisingly short, and either way the businesses no longer depend on it.
That's the difference between this farewell and the ones his rivals staged. The ownership career he described eighteen months ago already has a club, a shareholding and a corporate vehicle attached to it. The thousandth goal would complete the career everyone can already recite; what the CR7 companies are worth in the decades after it is the question he has spent years arranging in his own favour...
Cristiano Ronaldo next game for Al Nassr is on August 28, against Al Taawon, for the Saudi Pro League. You can watch Al Nassr vs Al Taawon, Real Madrid vs Real Sociedad, Barça vs Atheltic Bilbao, Crystal Palace vs Manchester City, Tottenham vs Newcastle and Liverpool vs Nottingham Forest, all matches provided from our football streaming game pages.
Al Nassr next game:
Al Nassr vs Al Taawon kick-off time (28-08-2026):
Beijing (China) | UTC/GMT+8: 03:00
India (New Delhi) | UTC/GMT+5.30: 00:30
Saudi Arabia (Riyadh) | UTC/GMT+4: 23:00
Spain (Madrid) | UTC/GMT+2: 21:00
Portugal and England (Lisbon/London) | UTC/GMT+1: 20:00
Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) | UTC/GMT-3: 16:00
New York (United States) | UTC/GMT-4: 15:00
Los Angeles (United States) | UTC/GMT-7: 12:00
Sources: ronaldo7.net / bloomberg.com / transfermarkt.com
