Cristiano Ronaldo tops Forbes’ list of the highest-paid soccer players

Veteran Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo once again topped Forbes magazine’s list of the highest-paid football players, to be among three professionals in Saudi Arabia on the list of the top ten players for the 2025-2026 season.

This is the sixth time in the last decade that Ronaldo has topped the Forbes list, and this comes a little more than a week after Bloomberg announced that the 40-year-old player had become the first billionaire in the world of football.

With profits from inside and outside the field estimated at approximately $280 million, Ronaldo, who defends the colors of the Saudi Al-Nasr Club, will earn more than twice what his former rival, second-placed Argentine star Lionel Messi, earns, whose revenues were estimated at $130 million, but the bulk of that revenue comes from outside the field and not from his salary with his current team, Inter Miami, USA.

In third place comes another professional player in the Saudi League, specifically with Al-Ittihad, the league champion, and he is Frenchman Karim Benzema, who earns $104 million annually thanks to his huge contract with his club.

As for the third professional player in the Saudi League on the list of the ten highest-paid players, he is Ronaldo’s teammate in Al-Nasr, Senegalese striker Sadio Mane, who earns an estimated $54 million, ranking him eighth on Forbes’ list.

In fact, the Saudi League lost a player on the top ten list compared to last season’s list, which is Brazilian Neymar, who left Al Hilal in January to return to his starting club, Santos.

Neymar ranked third on the last list after his revenue was estimated at $110 million in 2024-2025, but now he apparently earns only $38 million, most of which is from contracts unrelated to Santos.

Despite the strength and wealth of the English Premier League, whose clubs spent a record amount of 2.6 billion pounds ($3.5 billion) on transfers this summer, only two players from the Premier League succeeded in reaching the top ten, namely the Norwegian Erling Haaland, the top scorer for Manchester City, who came in fifth place, and the Egyptian Mohamed Salah, the top scorer for defending champion Liverpool. Which came in seventh place.

The most represented league in the top ten list is Spanish, with three players from Real Madrid: Frenchman Kylian Mbappe (fourth), Brazilian Vinicius Junior (sixth), and Englishman Jude Bellingham (ninth).
The other player from the Spanish League is young Barcelona star Lamine Gamal, who ranks tenth with $43 million.

“The ten highest-paid soccer players in the world combined are expected to earn an estimated $945 million during the 2025-2026 season,” Forbes said in a statement.