Nowadays, they both just score a lot of goals, but it's hardly a challenge playing for those two teams. Even guys like Ibra, RVP, Falcao and Cavani are scoring 30+ goals each season. A 1.00 gpg is slowly becoming the norm for top forwards, so it's not that surprising to find that these two are getting closer to 1.50... It's all just not that impressive on its own, it used to be that goals complemented great performances, now they've become a subsitute for it. And most people naively ascribe this to be some sort of great merit on the part of Messi or Cristiano, while it's far more to do with the utter dominance of the teams they're playing for. Think back to 2008-11 (Messi) or 2006-08 (Cristiano) when both of them were consistently playing at a world-class level, giving complete performances while also racking up incredible amounts of goals and assists and being decisive in the big games... Those were seasons worthy of BdO winners, now they're automatically included in the top-3 because of their status and consistent goalscoring in tailormade teams, even when they fail in the crucial moments.