Four Luxury Hotels Owned By Football Legends

Cristiano Ronaldo became the first active football player in history to reach billionaire status, and hospitality has played a direct role in that milestone. His CR7 hotel chain with Portuguese group Pestana now spans properties in Lisbon, New York, and Marrakech, part of a wider commercial portfolio that includes fashion, fragrances, and fitness gyms and earned him an estimated $275 million over the past year, according to Forbes. He isn't alone. Lionel Messi's MiM Hotels chain anchors a broader hospitality and real estate strategy in Spain, built alongside a media production company and a football club he acquired outright in 2024.

The pattern extends well beyond the two biggest names in the sport: Manchester United teammates Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs turned their post-retirement earnings into a five-star hotel in the city that made them famous, while Romanian legend Gheorghe Hagi has owned a hotel on the Black Sea coast since 1999. For a profession with a notoriously short shelf life, hospitality has become one of football's more considered second acts. Below is a list of four properties where footballing legacy and hotel ownership intersect most directly.

Cristiano Ronaldo's hotel ventures began in his hometown of Funchal, Madeira, and have since expanded into a small international chain in partnership with Portuguese hotel group Pestana, with properties now also in Lisbon and New York. The Marrakech outpost, opened in 2023 on M Avenue, sits within a fifteen-minute walk of the Palais des Congrès, roughly four kilometres from Jemaa el-Fnaa, and close enough to Menara Airport for a ten-minute transfer. The 174-room property is built around a rooftop terrace with a 360-degree panoramic view stretching from the city to the Koutoubia Mosque and the Atlas Mountains beyond, complete with an outdoor pool, a swim-up bar, and a waterfall feature shaded by palm trees. The hotel also runs a full spa with sauna and steam room facilities, a dedicated sports bar for major football fixtures, and Table M Brasserie, serving Portuguese cuisine with a Moroccan inflection. Rooms are contemporary and soundproofed against the city's nightlife, each with a private balcony or patio.

Rates start at €130 a night (approx. Rs. 14,400).

Manchester United teammates Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs turned to hospitality together, partnering with veteran hotelier Winston Zahra on a five-star property housed inside the city's former stock exchange building, a striking structure completed in 1906 and considered one of the finest examples of Edwardian Baroque architecture in Manchester. The conversion preserved much of the building's original detailing, and the 40-room hotel holds membership in Relais & Châteaux, the global collection of independently owned luxury properties known for design integrity and culinary standards. Its restaurant, Tender, is led by chef Niall Keating, previously of the two-Michelin-starred Restaurant Sat Bains, and has become a dining destination in its own right, independent of the hotel's football pedigree.

Rates start at £200 a night (approx. Rs. 25,900).

Lionel Messi's hospitality venture sits far from the beach towns typically associated with footballer-owned real estate. MiM Baqueira is a ski-in, ski-out property in Baqueira Beret, in Spain's Aran Valley, one of the most exclusive winter sports destinations in the country. The hotel's restaurant is led by Nandu Jubany, a Michelin-starred chef known for contemporary Catalan cooking, giving the property a genuine culinary identity beyond its ski access. Since 2025, MiM Baqueira has been brought under Meliá's management, integrating it into Spain's largest hospitality group while retaining its independent MiM branding, a structure that mirrors the broader logic of Messi's investment style: stable, equity-backed assets built around sectors he already understands, rather than a scattershot approach to licensing his name.

Rates start at €150 a night (approx. Rs 16,600).

Romanian football legend Gheorghe Hagi's hotel sits on the Black Sea coast in Mamaia, Romania's most prominent seaside resort town. Hagi purchased the property in 1999, well before his current status as one of the wealthiest former footballers in Eastern Europe was cemented; the building was previously known as the Bucharest Hotel and had opened in 1959 under Romania's Communist-era state tourism programme. The 122-room hotel holds four-star status and operates as a conference and spa property, catering to both business travellers and holidaymakers drawn to Mamaia's beach season. Of the four hotels here, it is the only one with a genuine multi-decade ownership history, predating the modern trend of athlete-branded hospitality by over two decades.

Rates start at £100 a night (approx. Rs 12,950).