Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has reached an impressive milestone outside the football field he is best known for.
The famous star player became the first person to hit the 250 million followers mark on Instagram.
This makes Ronaldo the world's most popular celebrity on the platform. Ronaldo is followed by pop star Ariana Grande (214 million followers) and Hollywood actor and wrestling icon Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (209 million) who are ranked 2nd and 3rd respectively in terms of number of followers on Instagram.
The second most followed sportsperson on Instagram is Ronaldo’s archrival and frenemy Lionel Messi, the footballer who has more than 170 million followers.
Ronaldo's 250 million followers on Instagram, in comparison, is larger than the combined followers tally of all 20 clubs in Premier League. The 20 clubs combined have 159 million followers, which is at this time 91 million followers less than Ronaldo’s overall numbers.
Thanks to his celebrity status and incredible social media fans, Ronaldo also earns huge amount of money through paid posts.
As reported by Forbes, Ronaldo is said to earn around $1 million per sponsored post on the platform
Ronaldo is known to post several photographs of his family, including his wife Georgina Rodriguez, who herself has more than 22 million followers on Instagram.
The footballer also enjoys a huge fan following on other social media platforms too, as he is the most followed person on Facebook and most followed athlete on Twitter.
At this time, the only account which has more followers than Ronaldo on Instagram, is Instagram itself with its official account, which has 382 million followers.
The achievement on Instagram didn't stop there, as Ronaldo's post that mourns the death of soccer legend Diego Maradona gained more than 19 million Likes, making it the most-Liked post of 2020.
Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro was born 5 February 1985 in São Pedro, Funchal, on the Portuguese island of Madeira.
Having won multiple Ballon d'Or awards and European Golden Shoes, Ronaldo is considered one of the greatest soccer players of all time. He is one of the few recorded players to have made over 1,000 professional career appearances and has scored over 750 senior career goals for club and country. Ronaldo is also the second player to score 100 international goals, and the first European to achieve the feat.
Ronaldo has in fact named the best Portuguese player of all time by the Portuguese Football Federation in 2015.
Following his debut in 2003 at the age of 18, Ronaldo is one of Portuguese's all-time top goal scorer, and has led his team to multiple winnings throughout the years.
As one of the most bankable and famous athletes in the world, Ronaldo was ranked the world's highest-paid athlete by Forbes in 2016 and 2017 and the world's most famous athlete by ESPN from 2016 to 2019.
Ronaldo is considered the first footballer, as well as only the third athlete, to have earned $1 billion in their career.
Ronaldo claims that age doesn’t matter to him as he is hoping to play for many years.
“It doesn’t matter the age. What is important is the mind,” Ronaldo told BBC Sport. “It doesn’t matter if Cristiano Ronaldo is good, you don’t know tomorrow what is going to happen. I live in the present, in the moment.”
