Ronaldo and Georgina's wedding: Why everyone got the venue and £10m budget wrong

Dubai: Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez married on Tuesday, exactly a year after she announced their engagement.

They did it in a private civil ceremony in Cascais, a coastal town west of Lisbon, attended by their five children. The announcement was a single Instagram post: two hands, two gold bands, both of them in white, captioned "C ❤️ G".

That is the entire public record of one of the most anticipated celebrity weddings in years.

For twelve months, the reporting had pointed somewhere else entirely.

What everyone expected

The consensus was Madeira, and it was remarkably firm.

Jornal da Madeira reported the couple would marry at Funchal Cathedral in Ronaldo's birthplace, after the World Cup, with a luxury reception at a nearby hotel. Gulf News carried that story last year. The cathedral holds 800 guests, was completed in 1514, and is the oldest church on the island.

Correio da Manhã went further in February this year, citing unnamed sources who said the cathedral had been approached about availability for a private autumn ceremony. Neither Ronaldo's management nor the Diocese of Funchal confirmed it.

Two other Madeira venues circulated: Quinta da Bela Vista, a Funchal estate that has hosted Aveiro family events, and the CR7 Hotel Pestana, which Ronaldo co-owns and which was quickly dismissed as too small.

A wedding invitation also went round social media at one point and turned out to be fake.

And what it was going to cost

The figure everyone quoted came from the branding expert Dylan Davey, founder of The Social Inc., speaking to the Daily Mail.

"If the ring is already north of £1.5 million as reported, you can be certain the wedding budget will be many times that," he said. "We could be looking at £10 million-plus once you factor in a destination venue, couture wardrobes, world-class entertainment, VIP travel, and global security, the kind of scale you'd expect for one of the most talked-about weddings since Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez."

The clue nobody picked up

Ronaldo had explained what was going to happen. He said it out loud, in an interview, and it was reported at the time.

Asked when the wedding would be, he said they planned to do it after the World Cup with the trophy, then immediately qualified it.

"But she is not the person that likes big parties," he said. "She doesn't like it. She likes private things. So I will respect these decisions."

That is not an ambiguous statement. It was simply less interesting than a cathedral.

He had been similarly unromantic about the proposal itself, admitting he popped the question at around one in the morning without getting down on one knee. "I'm not a romantic guy," he said, before adding that he had tears in his eyes.

What the ring is worth

This is where the second set of predictions went sideways, and the disagreement is worth seeing laid out.

77 Diamonds: around $5 million, estimated at 35 carats Page Six: $2 million to $5 million, 15 to 20 carats Frank Darling: over 15 carats, more likely 20 to 25 Laura Taylor, via the Daily Mail: £1.5 million, almost certainly platinum

Four assessments, spanning roughly $1.5 million to $5 million, and carat estimates ranging from eight to 35 depending on which analysis you read. Every one of them was made from photographs rather than the ring itself, which is the reason for the spread.

Tobias Kormind of 77 Diamonds compared it to the Taylor-Burton Diamond, the 69.42 carat pear-shaped stone Richard Burton bought for Elizabeth Taylor.

Georgina's own reaction was less breathless. She has said the proposal was the last thing on her mind, and Ronaldo recalled that she had not cared about the ring at all. "She asked me if I was honest and I said, I want you and I want to marry you."

The Instagram post announcing it drew more than 18 million likes.

For scale

She is not shy of jewellery generally. At the Venice Film Festival last year she wore more than 100 carats of Pasquale Bruni diamonds worth roughly $650,000, including an 87.7 carat choker and a pair of earrings, alongside the engagement ring.

Which makes Tuesday's plain gold bands the more striking choice.

The couple

They met in 2016 in a Gucci shop in Madrid, where she was working as a sales assistant. Speaking to Vogue last year, she said it felt as if they had known each other all their lives.

Ronaldo is 41 and Georgina is 32. Between them they have five children: Cristiano Jr, 16, twins Eva Maria and Mateo, nine, Alana, eight, and Bella, four. All five were at the ceremony.

What we still do not know

Nearly everything.

The venue in Cascais has not been named. There are no details of the ceremony itself, no guest list beyond the children, no photographs beyond the ring shot, and nothing on what either of them wore.

Portuguese outlets reporting yesterday were explicit that the discretion of the announcement means the details simply are not out there yet.

They will come. When they do, the interesting question is whether the wedding everyone spent a year describing bears any resemblance to the one that actually took place.