A new study by the sports marketing agency Nossa Sports and the audience intelligence platform Felton has compared the economic audience value from each Cristiano Ronaldo and the Portuguese National Team during the World Cup.

The Cristiano Ronaldo brand is estimated to have generated approximately 92.9 million euros in digital audience value from posting only 59 pieces of content, SAPO reports. In comparison, this greatly surpasses the Portuguese National Team, which generated 76.5 million euros from 1,293 pieces of content.

In total, the digital ecosystem analysed amongst Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese National Team, and the newspaper A Bola and RTP totalled approximately 170.6 million euros in True Audience Value (TAV) during the 47 days analysed.

True Audience Value

A total of 389,000 unique authors participated in the conversation generated across the social media platforms Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube.

Instagram accounts for 89 percent of the total economic value generated, approximately 152.5 million euros; X accounts for 58 percent of all posts analysed, but generates only 5.9 percent of the value. YouTube has the most positive sentiment in the entire study, but a negligible economic value, the report reveals.

True Audience Value (TAV) calculates the economic value of an audience based on the quality of their engagement, rather than the quantity of their reach.

“We analysed the conversation author by author, more than 25 distinct emotions, and not just positive or negative. TAV measures the value of those who stopped, commented, and returned, not how many screens a post reached,” explains André Costa, founder and CEO of Felton, quoted in a press release.

Value per post

The study reveals that the Portuguese National Team has the largest audience in the study, with 259,811 authors, but the value per post is 24 times lower than that of Cristiano Ronaldo. On Instagram, each of Ronaldo’s post were worth an average of 2.9 million euros. To put this into perspective, a single one of Ronaldo’s posts generated more value than A Bola and RTP combined during the entire tournament across all social media platforms.

The study also reveals that 75 percent of the National Team’s active audience were outside of the Portuguese-speaking world, with only 14 percent being Portuguese. India represented 12 percent, Brazil 11 percent, and Iran at 7 percent.

According to the report, an active audience is “the number of unique audience members who actively engage with the content through comments, replies, shares, or other forms of meaningful interaction within a defined period.”

For the managing director of Nossa Sports, Miguel Guerra, these figures change "the conversation about sponsorship, not because the National Team becomes an international asset, it already was, but because we stop presuming and start having measurable data.”

Continued support for Ronaldo

After Portugal’s elimination from the World Cup, Ronaldo’s audience maintained a positive attitude of 83 percent, whereas the National Team fell to 48.5 percent, after having reached 85 percent during the tournament. As the study explains it, this “emotional volatility is what separates the national team from Ronaldo, as one is a window-activated asset (you buy the moment), the other is a constant-temperature asset (you buy the devotion).”

Despite Ronaldo and the national team both being associated with the Portuguese National Team, the study concludes that they function as two distinct commercial assets.