Cristiano Ronaldo: Football's first billionaire player

**Simon Jack** (0:05)
It's 2009, a cold January morning. A 23-year-old grips the wheel of a two-day-old $300,000 Ferrari. Overhead aeroplanes are coming into land at Manchester Airport.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:17)
He zooms down into a tunnel, and then he smashes into the wall. The front of his sports car crumples, and the windscreen smashes.

**Simon Jack** (0:26)
He gets out of the car, his tall body ripped with muscles. The car is totaled, but he's OK, with barely a hair out of place on his perfectly coiffed head.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:35)
He jumps into a Bentley that was following right behind him. There's no time to lose. He has to be on the pitch within the hour.

**Simon Jack** (0:42)
Because this footballer never misses training, and it's his dedication, obsession, some would say, that will make him a billionaire.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:51)
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Every episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

**Simon Jack** (0:58)
We take them from zero to their first million and then from a million on to a billion.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:02)
My name is Zing Tsjeng and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

**Simon Jack** (1:05)
And I'm Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:07)
And on this episode, we've got a billionaire who is actually the subject of several requests from listeners.

**Simon Jack** (1:13)
Yeah, a few of you have requested this one, including Mark, who emailed to say, I just wanted to say how much I enjoy listening to the podcast. Thank you, Mark. It's consistently interesting, well researched and very engaging. As a suggestion for a future episode, I'd love to hear the story of Cristiano Ronaldo.
He's a slightly different kind of billionaire, a genuine rags to riches story. Be fascinating to see him through the good, bad or just another billionaire lens. He said, I really think it will be kind of tough. Interesting.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:40)
Well, if you're a football fan, whether he's good or bad, probably depends on whether he's playing for your side or not.

**Simon Jack** (1:45)
Yeah.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:45)
I mean, the closest I can come to describing it as someone who doesn't watch tons of football is like, it's like watching someone dance ballet next to someone who can't dance at all.

**Simon Jack** (1:54)
Yeah. No, he had a fleet of foot for sure. He's got dozens of world records, including the most goals scored in international football, 968 at the time of recording, and the most international caps, 226 for his home country of Portugal.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:09)
Now, 41 years old, he was declared a billionaire just last year worth $1.4 billion.

**Simon Jack** (2:15)
Now, that puts him in a very elite club of billionaire athletes, which you can actually count on your fingers. By many metrics, he's the most famous athlete, some would say, in the world. I'm sure Leonor Messi might have something to say about that.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:27)
Well, Ronaldo is also regularly described as arrogant, as narcissistic, and his behaviour, both on and off the pitch, is very rarely out of the headlines. So let's try to answer Mark's question, and to do that, we'll have to go back to the beginning of Ronaldo's story.

**Simon Jack** (2:47)
Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Evero was born in 1985 in Madeira, small Portuguese island out in the Atlantic Ocean. His mother Dolores was a cook and a cleaner. His father, Denis, worked as a municipal gardener.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:01)
Denis had been a soldier at war and he struggled with depression and alcoholism. Ronaldo was their fourth child and he was an accident. His mother actually considered having an abortion and she's Catholic and very religious, which just goes to show that they were in pretty dire straits at the time. He was raised in poverty and Ronaldo has said, I was brought up with nothing. I had no toys, no Christmas presents. I shared a room with my brother and two sisters and my parents slept in the other. And him and his siblings would apparently often wait outside a local McDonald's late at night when hungry, hoping the workers might sneak them left over Big Macs. But he said it wasn't a bad childhood. He said it was all we knew, everyone around us lived the same way and we were happy.

**Simon Jack** (3:40)
There was a football connection. His father worked part-time as a kit man at the local club Andorina and he asked a player there to be Ronaldo's godfather. Now this godfather said that from a young age, Ronaldo played football constantly. When the other kids were studying, he put his studies on the back seat in order to play football. He also bought him a toy car one Christmas, but Ronaldo kicked up a fuss because he wanted a ball.