The incident is believed to have happened on Monday night or during the early hours of Tuesday morning, hours after Barcelona player Messi beat Ronaldo to FIFA’s Ballon d’Or award for player of the year.
Ronaldo’s sister Katia Aveiro has deemed the vandalism “a shameful act committed out of jealousy towards him.”
Within hours of pictures of the defaced statue doing their rounds on social media, the 3.40-metre-high bronze effigy had been cleaned up.
The statue was unveiled in December 2014 on the Funchal seafront by the Portuguese player himself, who originally hails from the island of Madeira, just a stone’s throw from his self-financed museum.