Medialivre’s financial results for the first year after the acquisition were published in July last year, showing a profit of 4.2 million euros, down from 7.2 million in 2023, when the company was purchased by a consortium of 11 investors, including Cristiano Ronaldo.
Three years ago, Cofina, a group that owned titles such as CMTV, Correio da Manhã, Record and TV Guia, was negotiated for 70 million euros. Ronaldo is the individual shareholder with the largest stake in the holding company Expressão Livre, with 30%.
Ronaldo’s company committed to an allocation of 13.095 million euros, as a premium, in a total share capital that involved contributions of 34.9 million euros, according to the portal Página Um.
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Thus, CR7 supported 37.52% of the investment, proportionally exceeding its share in the capital.
At the time, the player and his allies competed for Cofina with Media Capital, one of the largest media conglomerates in Portugal, owner of TVI and CNN.
At the end of March, Pedro Morais Leitão, executive president of the group, revealed to the Expresso newspaper that FIFA asked for 430 thousand euros for the television broadcast of each World Cup game, having rejected all of TVI’s proposals for acquiring the rights.
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Leitão criticized Google for “supporting the launch of LiveMode in our country”, stating that FIFA saw the project as a way of forcing free-to-air television stations to accept unrealistic prices.
Little did Leitão know that, less than two months after his nonsense against LiveMode PT and its project to broadcast 34 World Cup games on YouTube, he would have Ronaldo in his path again, this time seeing the player as
Ronaldo’s opposing media business models
The Al-Nassr striker joins a corporate structure that includes founders Edgar Diniz and Sérgio Lopes, partner Leo Lenz Cesar and Thiago Tourinho, as well as General Atlantic and a private equity fund from XP Asset, which entered the company’s capital two years ago.
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LiveMode PT and its digital-first narrative supported by broadcasts led by creators and free sports on YouTube, converge towards a model completely different from the bet made by Ronaldo three years ago. Here we have the most recurrent clash in this industry between traditional media and creator media.
According to , CazéTV is among the top three channels in the world in total hours of live content in 2026, accumulating almost 230 million hours watched. Ronaldo adds another 672 million followers on Instagram and 78 million subscribers on YouTube.
In Tourinho’s words, the superstar’s entry into the business is “a very powerful validation.”
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In 2024, just when General Atlantic acquired a minority stake in LiveMode, as the global investment firm predicted, ten years earlier, the future of media at a time when investors shunned content creators.
At the end of last year, it was LiveMode’s turn to take over 100% of CazéTV after incorporating the 49% stake that was held by CMiguel Produções. I analyzed the new moment, explaining why the biggest Brazilian case of creator media ratified a thesis adopted by one of the most influential global venture capital firms, based on the content + community + distribution tripod.
At the time, I argued that the change was a reflection of the exhaustion of the venture capital-funded media model over the past decade.
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Now, with the entry of the most popular football player in the world, at least in social terms, analyst Simon Lane says there is a “maximum chance” of Ronaldo recouping his investment through advertising and sponsorship.
As I have said, the sensation of content anywhere, triggered by the division of rights into multiple packages for different platforms, will demand attention from holders and distributors at the same time that the competition for packages of sports properties embraces the movement towards streaming.
The impact of the hybrid ecosystem
As Ronaldo strengthens LiveMode PT with his social presence and direct investment, the effects of this model are beginning to reverberate globally.
The equation of sports rights + creators + athletes + digital platforms results in a hybrid ecosystem that challenges the status quo of traditional media, as Lane notes.
For IP owners such as FIFA and European leagues, the expansion of this model represents an opportunity for additional reach and incremental monetization, according to Lane.
The durability of this impact, however, depends on the maturation of the digital ecosystem: if traditional broadcasters accept the new format or continue to resist, the balance of commercial value will change radically in the coming years.
On the broadcasters’ side, the situation is more delicate. Currently, they operate in different audience ranges.
CazéTV, for example, has an audience of 80% under 40 years old, but this segmentation is not sustainable indefinitely.
For Lane, there are two paths: either they focus only on the traditional audience and accept a decline in young reach, or they start to collaborate with creators and participate in the auction for digital packages, exploring new forms of distribution.
For creators, these days are opportunities, as long as they get the investment. As Lane stressed, money typically follows opportunity, but the creator ecosystem is so fragmented that this capitalization is taking longer than many imagine.
Meanwhile, there are other global movements that signal that the future of live sports media no longer involves studios and linear grids, but rather communities built on digital.
Skeptics have become the new buyers
In April, former player Gary Neville, the same man who once called YouTubers “cursed” and said he would never invite Mark Goldbridge to his podcast, announced that his media group, The Overlap, had purchased two of the biggest fan channels on YouTube: The United Stand and That’s Football, from Goldbridge, totaling 3.7 million subscribers.
The undisclosed value was in the seven figures.
At the beginning of the year, Global, one of the largest commercial radio companies in Europe, appeared on The Overlap, signaling a new look at creators in the context of sports rights.
The irony is perfect for those who follow the sector. Neville spent years disdaining the creators. In his conception, Goldbridge was the face of the “excited fan who reacted to results”, exactly the format that traditional TV treated as amateur.
As Paola Marinone and Bengü Atamer analyzed, large media conglomerates (Global, The Chernin Group, Liberty Media) realized that it is more efficient to buy a community than to build one.
“It’s easy to start a podcast, but scaling from one to over 1 million subscribers is becoming extraordinarily difficult,” they wrote.
Legacy asset owners look for exits, and network builders look for scale. The fan channel, once overlooked by broadcasters, analysts suggest, is now a blue-chip asset.
The question is: how quickly will this model expand to different markets and sports, and how much value can it generate in an increasingly fragmented and competitive environment?
During the cycle between the Qatar Cups and, now, USA-Canada-Mexico, CazéTV and LiveMode demonstrated that creator-driven distribution has reshaped sports broadcasting. The next transition will be the network effect, with leagues, platforms and creators operating within the same ecosystem.
The unspoken rule is that IPs that don’t combine cross-platform reach, loyal community, and scalable formats tend to fall by the wayside.
In both the cases of Ronaldo and Gary Neville, the maxim that talent converts attention into corporate value is valid. The IP of athlete-creators stops being a vanity project and becomes active.
We are moving from the logic of a fixed rights fee to an ecosystem monetization model.
