Ronaldo looks to score with european hotels

Not content with winning FIFA's player of the year award three times, Cristiano Ronaldo is hoping to score off the pitch this year with a major investment in European hotels.

The soccer star is kicking 37.5 million euros into commercial property, the biggest investment the footballer has ever made. His investment will see him team up with the Pestana Hotel Group on four separate boutique hotels.

The first two will be located in Portugal and are set to open this year in Lisbon and the island of Madeira. The other two will be located in Madrid and New York City and are expected to open their doors in 2017. Together, they will account for a total of 400 rooms.

"This is the biggest project of my life," the 30-year-old footballer told the press. "It’s an investment in a completely different area, but as you can imagine the goal is to take care of my future and the future of my son."

Ronaldo will own half of the joint venture, which totals 70 million euros, with Ronaldo stumping up half of the overall cash required.

"I’m and ambitious person and a fighter," he added. "Obviously this is a completely different world. My world is playing soccer but we all know that life won’t always be like this."

Ronaldo's punt on hotels follows an overall wave of support for European's commercial property markets, as sentiment surrouding the continent's economy has improved. Figures from Cushman & Wakefield show that in USD terms, global investment into Europe rose 35.5 per cent in 2014, while European cross border investment within the region rose 14.4 per cent. While the UK, Germany and France took three quarters of that, Spain began drawing capital from all global regions - the only country other than the UK to do so.

That rising optimism continued into 2015, with a total of €50.1 billion invested in European commercial property in the first quarter of last year, according to Knight Frank's latest report, up 44 per cent from the previous quarter.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s CR7 brand is the main inspiration behind the four hotels, which the company says will "appeal to the modern day millennial traveller".

With these new openings, the Pestana Hotel Group will grow to over 90 hotels in 16 countries.