Insensitive Cristiano Ronaldo angers Buddhists with social media post

New Delhi: Global superstar Cristiano Ronaldo incurred the wrath on social media after hurting religious sentiments of Buddhist with an insensitive social media post on Thursday.

The Real Madrid forward shared a photo in Instagram with his famous right foot resting at the base of a Buddha statue. In the photo caption, he wrote Bom dia, meaning good morning in Portuguese.

The photo was also posted on his Facebook page.

 

Bom dia

A photo posted by Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano) on Oct 20, 2016 at 12:25am PDT

The 31-year-old may not have intentionally put his foot, but the Portuguese sure managed to enraged thousands of practicing Buddhist, and many have demanded apology from the three-time World Player of the Year.

The controversial post has already raked in more than 1.8m likes in Instagram on it's second day of existence on social media.

Known as CR7 to his global fans, the former Manchester United player has online presence in all major platforms, and it's reported that these official accounts are managed by non-other than super-agent Jorge Mendes's daughter, Maria Mendes.

Ronaldo has more than 244 million followers across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. In fact, he became the first athlete to surpass 200 million followers on social media and he is the most-followed male on social media.

But after this unwarranted issue, his grand total is likely to lose some numbers, but not enough to impair his loyal fan-base.

Enraged fans have already started posting comments,

"Cristiano Ronaldo I am your fan.But you should respect our Buddha.However you're Christian or Islam or Hindu.You have a lot of fan from these religion.You're famous football player.I apologize you.Please don't do like that.This photo hit our(Buddhisms)heart. Only religions can understand me," one Facebook post by Waz Tniym Gnian Hkt read.

"This is disrespectful .... How can he put his leg on Gautam Buddha .... I was not expecting this stupidity from Ronaldo .... Sir today u lost one of ur fan this is very bad," wrote another fan, Shubham Pandey in Facebook.

Regarded as one of the greatest footballers of all time, Ronaldo is a practicing Roman Catholic.