Meanwhile, Ronaldo and Messi have regularly shared the title of the best football player in the world for more than a decade. To this day, both are still names that attract special attention in each of their matches.

Recently, Daily Star Sport did a statistics on the entire career income as well as the net worth of all 3 superstars to find out who deserves the number one spot.

Ronaldo’s net worth

Third on Forbes’ list of the world’s highest-paid athletes in 2021, Ronaldo has earned £88m in the past year. In particular, the Portuguese star received money including a huge salary of £ 51 million and £ 37 million from a lifetime contract with Nike, plus partnerships with Herbalife, Tag Heuer and Clear shampoo..

Forbes also included Ronaldo in the list of sportsmen with the highest income from 2010-2019, second only to boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr with a total income of nearly £590 million.

Although it is impossible to know the exact net worth of Ronaldo, but estimates of sponsorship, salary plus investments, Ronaldo will own about 363 million pounds.

Lionel Messi’s Net Worth

Ranked second on Forbes’ list of highest paid athletes of 2021, Messi brought in £95.5 million. As with his Portuguese counterpart, that figure could be divided into £71m in wages from his final season with Barcelona and £24m in cash from PSG.

The Argentinian player owns a store named after him in Barcelona with his own clothing line, besides he also signed a lifetime endorsement contract with Adidas.

It is estimated that Messi’s net worth is about 309 million pounds.

Michael Jordan’s net worth

Not many former athletes have billions of dollars, but Jordan is a special case.

Throughout his career, the NBA legend regularly surprises. He always knows how to create new turning points both on and off the field. While playing for the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards, Jordan earned just over £66 million – a negligible amount when compared to his brand.

Forbes says Jordan has earned £1.32 billion from being the face of brands such as Nike, Hanes and beverage company Gatorade. More specifically, since 1984, Nike’s Air Jordan shoe model alone has helped the former athlete pocket 1 billion pounds.

Overall, Jordan, the owner of the Charlotte Hornets basketball team in the NBA, has a net worth of around £1.2 billion.

Conclude

According to the above estimates, the combined net worth of Messi and Ronaldo is £672 million, a huge number. Even so, this is still lower than Jordan’s net worth, which is around 1.2 billion. Even when adding Messi and Ronaldo’s money together, they are still around £500 million behind Jordan.

This gap is expected to widen, given the fact that Messi and Ronaldo are playing the final years of their careers.