UP459 Cristiano Ronaldo at 40: The New Template for Sporting Celebrity?

Unofficial Partner Podcast

Rory Smith recently wrote a think piece in the New York Times titled What is Ronaldo at 40? The article posed some good questions about the nature of sporting celebrity in 2025 and beyond.

So we asked Rory on to the podcast to discuss, with two expert guests from the sports industry, Louise Johnson and Andy Meikle.

Rory Smith joined The Athletic from the New York Times, where he spent eight years as Chief Soccer Correspondent and then Global Sports Correspondent. He has previously worked for The Times of London, The Independent, the Daily Telegraph and ESPN. He is a regular contributor to BBC 5 Live. He is the author of two books on soccer: Mister and Expected Goals.

Louise Johnson is Global CEO of Fuse, Omnicom’s sport and entertainment agency whose clients include many of the biggest organisations in sport including PepsiCo, Google and Vodafone. Louise was chair of judges for the sport category at the Cannes Lions Festival and was named as one of the FT’s women of the year.

Andy Meikle is the founder and CEO of Recast, a fintech company that enables media owners to monetise digital content from £0.01, with payments via RecastPay, a wallet that distributes earnings in real time to multiple parties including affiliates, such as athletes. He was formerly one of the founders of Sportlobster, digital platform which had Cristiano Ronaldo as the company’s brand ambassador

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Chapters

1. UP459 Cristiano Ronaldo at 40: The New Template for Sporting Celebrity? (00:00:00)

2. Quiet quitting a podcast is a thing (00:02:40)

3. What is Ronaldo at 40? (00:04:28)

4. 'The version of football the Saudi Pro League represents' (00:04:53)

5. 'More Mr Beast than Erling Haaland' (00:05:14)

6. Roadmap or outlier? (00:07:35)

7. Marketing or performance (00:08:41)

8. 'Piquet is a marmite character' (00:10:09)

9. Revolutionaries are terrible at government (00:12:52)

10. Virality is great but who pays the rights fee? (00:18:32)

11. Ronaldo TV (00:21:04)

12. He likes being famous, Messi doesn't (00:24:54)

13. 'I don't know what he stands for beyond doing deals' (00:28:16)

14. Athlete as creator forgets the creator bit (00:31:18)

15. Trumpian tendencies (00:36:10)

16. Pele's 1000 goals (00:38:13)

17. Roadmap or outlier? (00:41:58)

18. Do you trust him to curate content honestly? (00:49:02)

19. Personalisation at scale is what TikTok does (00:52:35)