With 747.1 million followers on Social Media, Ronaldo is causing chaos in the Portugal camp

Controversial Manchester United forward Cristiano Ronaldo celebrated his first World Cup 'win' before kicking a ball in Qatar - because he is the competition's most influential superstar on social media with 747.1 million followers.

The Portugal and Manchester United striker is followed by Messi (476 million) and Neymar (337.5 million), giving the three players a combined social media reach of more than one billion worldwide.

Under these parameters, Ronaldo's followers are more than 4.5 times greater than the followers of the England national teams (164 million) and greater than the sum of the population of all the countries in which he has played: England (55.9 million), Italy (59 million), Spain (47.3 million) and Portugal (10.1 million), with a total of 172.3 million.

To put the reader's numbers in perspective, you would have to fill Wembley Stadium, with a capacity of 90,000, more than eight thousand times to get close to the number of people who follow CR7 on social media. Or more than nine thousand times Lusail Stadium, where the Qatar World Cup final will be played, which has a capacity of 80,000. Or ten thousand times Old Trafford, which has a capacity of 74,310, fourteen thousand times the Jose Alvalade stadium (Sporting Clube de Portugal, which holds 50,095 spectators) and its social media following exceeds the entire population of Europe (446.8 million).

Ronaldo's total audience helps make Portugal the most followed team in Qatar 2022 with a total of 826 million, ahead of Brazil with 678 million and Argentina with 619 million.

Karim Benzema, Gareth Bale, Kylian Mbappe, Luis Suarez, Paulo Dybala, Antoine Griezmann and Robert Lewandowski make up the the Top 10 for the tournament.

The sum of the total followers of the top 10 players, 2.1 billion, is greater than the sum of the total followers of the rest of the Qatar 2022 World Cup players combined (1.7 billion).

This research was conducted by PR, digital and football agency PMPR Excellence to analyse the global social media influence of the World Cup.

All 831 players from the 32 finalists, were tracked by PMPR Football Social Influencer mapping of players, squads and national associations in the study.

Meanwhile, Ronaldo’s figure is probably one of the reasons why Portugal's first day in Qatar has been a crazy one. The squad is based more than 30 kilometres from the city of Doha and will be preparing for their participation in the World Cup at the Shahaniya Sports Centre.

The Portuguese Football Federation has set up an isolated camp to ensure that Fernando Santos' team is disturbed as little as possible... at least that's the plan

However, Ronaldo's explosive interview about his difficult situation at Manchester United has disturbed the calm in Portugal's training camp. On the first day of press conferences and training, there was chaos at the Shahaniya Sports Centre.

Hundreds of journalists from all over the world wanted to attend the events planned by Portugal, but some of them could not get in because they had not completed the FPF's request correctly (access had to be requested more than 24 hours in advance).

The security provided by the World Cup organisers was completely overwhelmed by the number of media representatives who wanted to enter.

It was an international media pack including MARCA and a lot of English outlets.

Still in the street, and still unable to enter the facilities, some Portuguese journalists recognised that: "This is because of Cristiano Ronaldo. That interview...". Most agree that the expectation around Fernando Santos' team is not ideal.

Bernardo Silva was the player who appeared at the press conference and more than half of the questions were about CR7. His speech was always the same: "The information coming from England has nothing to do with the Portuguese national team. It doesn't affect me, it affects Cristiano Ronaldo. I'm not going to comment on anything."

In training, Cristiano Ronaldo took to the pitch alongside Pepe. They both played with a ball and then took part in one of the three drills organised by Fernando Santos. Cristiano was at one end and Bruno Fernandes at the other.