Cristiano Ronaldo’s off-field empire grew again this month with the opening of Insparya’s Riyadh branch at Kingdom Hospital, his long-running hair-health venture that started in Europe and now counts 15 clinics. The company announced the Saudi opening with Ronaldo on site for the ribbon-cutting and a flurry of posts from the brand’s Middle East account.
The clinic launch dovetailed with a rare personal admission in a chat on MBC Loud FM, the English-language Saudi radio station. The interview rolled out across the station’s feeds, cut into short clips and captions that traveled quickly. In one clip, Ronaldo says, “People just look better with hair.” The line carried the mix of vanity and honesty that has always shadowed his image, and it set off a wave of jokes, memes, and barbershop takes.
Headlines framed the moment as fear. That oversold it a bit. What Ronaldo actually offered was closer to a worldview on grooming and confidence than a confession. “If you see me without hair, I will not be the same person,” he said in the same Loud FM interview, a sentence that sounds less like panic and more like brand clarity from a 40-year-old who has turned presentation into a business. His image, from fitness routines to meticulous grooming, has long been part of the CR7 brand—and it’s why fans still talk about Cristiano Ronaldo’s best haircuts almost as much as his goals.
The reaction has split along predictable lines. Some fans relish the ultra-polished CR7 persona and see this as on-brand content. Others read the quotes as marketing for the clinic. And there’s a third group, maybe the most interesting, that applauds a global star for talking plainly about appearance and male insecurity. On that point Ronaldo went further in the interview, saying, “The people go to the clinic a little bit, they go a little bit shy,” before noting that what once felt stigmatized now feels routine, “like… you go to the dentist to do the checkup.”
What CR7 actually said
The fuller context matters. Loud FM’s own teasers emphasize the light tone as much as the message. The station’s clip packages center on the playful exchange with host Byron Cooke and stick with the top-line sentiment that “people just look better with hair.” That framing makes the viral “scared of going bald” tag feel like a social gloss more than a word Ronaldo used.
On the business side, Insparya’s Saudi launch has been building for months, with corporate materials describing a 1,000-square-meter facility, a suite of transplant and regenerative treatments, and what the company says are more than 70,000 treated patients across its network. The Riyadh opening also fits a broader pattern of Ronaldo planting roots in the Kingdom while starring for Al-Nassr.
This moment also lands inside a different CR7 news cycle, one tied to his earning power and late-career output. His net worth has been estimated around the billion-dollar mark, as detailed in Ronaldo hits the billion mark, and he remains one of the highest-paid athletes in the world. Much of that wealth, from real estate to cars, is chronicled in how Cristiano Ronaldo spends his millions, which underlines how each off-field venture feeds the next. The more he compounds off the field, the more each micro-quote becomes a branding event.
So, does Ronaldo fear baldness? The most accurate read is simpler. He prefers hair, believes it helps him feel like himself, and is comfortable saying so. That’s not a confession as much as a thesis statement for a business he has backed for years. As he put it on air, “People just look better with hair.” In a media climate built on one-liners, it was the most Ronaldo way possible to make a clinic opening feel like news.
