Cristiano Ronaldo joined YouTube last year and quickly built one of the most-followed accounts on the platform. This weekend he turned it into a live sports streaming service, broadcasting the Riyadh Premier Padel Finals to viewers across the world.
Ronaldo’s account, which has more than 73 million subscribers, is streaming the event’s semifinals and finals in Saudi Arabia on Sunday. It’s the first time he’s broadcast padel on his account, and a rare example of an athlete turning his personal social media account into a livestream for traditional sports.
The web of overlapping interests here is significant. Not only is Ronaldo an investor in padel via a training complex in Portugal, he also plays on a Riyadh-based team in the Saudi Pro League, which is backed by the nation’s sovereign wealth fund. He is paid hundreds of millions per year to play in the country, and frequently appears at events in the kingdom and in marketing to support its investments and tourism efforts.
A representative for Premier Padel, which is backed by Qatari sovereign wealth, said in an email that Ronaldo is not an investor in the league and was not paid to run the live stream. Ronaldo is close with Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the chairman of both Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and Premier Padel. The group’s standard broadcast partners include Red Bull TV, beIN Sports, Canal+ and ESPN.
For emerging sports like padel, celebrities can be a critical conduit for reaching both new participants and new viewers. And Ronaldo is no standard celebrity. He’s one of the most popular athletes in the world and was also the highest paid last year. The 40-year-old made $260 million in 2024, per Sportico’s estimates, comprised of about $45 million from endorsements and $215 million via his contract with Al-Nassr.
Ronaldo launched his YouTube account in August. A month later he surpassed 1 billion followers across all his social media account, the first celebrity to hit that mark.
Padel has pushed to utilize that celebrity. He’s appeared in videos promoting the sports—including some from the Riyadh event earlier in the week. A video he posted in September, headlined “I beat THE BEST Padel player in the world,” has more than 2.4 million views.
While viewership data wasn’t immediately available for Sunday’s livestream, it had more than 54,000 likes prior to the start of the finals. During a rain delay that began afterward, the stream consistently had hundreds of concurrent viewers, many spamming the chat section and professing their support for the soccer star.