Cristiano Ronaldo expands his business empire with 25% stake in UD Almería

Cristiano Ronaldo has acquired 25 percent of UD Almería. According to the Spanish football club, “the move forms part of the global strategy led by president Mohamed Al Khereiji via SMC Group.”

The terms of the deal – what price Ronaldo is paying, how he is paying it, what role if any he will be playing in the team’s governance – remain undisclosed. What we do know is that Ronaldo is making the acquisition through CR7 Sports Investments, a subsidiary of his holding company, CR7 S.A. (whose name consists of his initials and his usual jersey number). The subsidiary appears to have been established within the past two months.

SMC Group, a consortium of Saudi investors, purchased the entirety of the UD Almería at the end of the 2024/25 season, for a reported €100 million (Infobae), and installed its leader, Al Khereiji, as club owner and President. The change in ownership is therefore recent, and the club’s value is unlikely to have risen in the interim.

Almería was relegated from LaLiga’s Primera division in 2024, having finished its season in 19th place, with three wins, 12 draws and 23 losses, 22 of them consecutive. This yielded a point total of 21. Survival totals typically range from 35 to 40. In 2024/25, now competing in the Segunda division, it finished sixth, with 69 points. Respectable, not stellar. And 25 percent of €100 million is €25 million.

Al Khereiji has four objectives:

• To restore the club to LaLiga’s Primera division
• To bring to fruition the plans of his predecessor, Turki Al-Sheikh, for a €13 million academy and training center (“ciudad deportiva,” or sports complex) – as yet in planning
• To complete the remodeling of the club’s stadium, whose second stage has been delayed to summer 2026
• To boost sponsorships and global branding, expand the fanbase and secure long-term self-sustainability

It stands to reason that Ronaldo’s name could help with the fourth objective.

A sportsman’s transformation

Ronaldo, 41, is still heading out onto the pitch, for Al Nassr or Portugal. As he said last year at the Tourise Summit in Riyadh, though, the forthcoming North American World Cup will be his last. But he has not waited for retirement to branch out.

Ronaldo has been building a personal-brand conglomerate for at least 13 years. Rather than sport per se, he began with fashion. The line of underwear and shoes he brought to market in 2013, CR7 Underwear, is still going. Investments in hospitality and restaurants ensued. Although he has invested in health clinics, fitness tech and Crunch gyms, sport proper didn’t enter Ronaldo’s portfolio until 2023, with the investment in Padel City. Since then he has become co-owner of WOW FC (MMA) and, now, of UD Almería.

His holding company, CR7, dates to 2016.

Worth noting as an asset in its own right, albeit of a different kind, is Ronaldo’s formidable presence online. We reported on his YouTube channel in August 2024. At the time it was a month old and had amassed 47 million subscribers and 255 million views. It now has 78.2 million subscribers and 966 million views – all this with a mere 131 videos.

According to EpidemicSound, Ronaldo has the world’s second-ranked Instagram account (671m followers), behind Instagram itself (700m) and ahead of Lionel Messi (511m). According to Alpha Index, Ronaldo is the “digital G.O.A.T.” – with more followers than anyone else on Instagram or Facebook, more followers than all but four others on X, and more than 1 billion combined followers on all of his social-media accounts.