@Lord SInister I think we're mostly in agreement actually, I just disagree that shots per goal is significant and I do think scoring for a worse team makes it more impressive even if they're both incredible teams. I do think Ronaldo's slightly the better goalscorer of the two because:
1) He's actually been scoring more, even if the difference is small.
2) He's been playing for a worse team
3) He scores more in the CL knockouts by a big difference, a lot more important goals at that stage is significant
Point 2 is definitely arguable since there's a lot more that goes into it, both teams have been scoring similar amounts of goals and they have different styles. Ronaldo's also had more penalties although I don't know if he wins more of them than Messi for example. The difference is small either way and we don't disagree by much. Let's just leave it at that since we're going in circles now
No one talked about this until past year, and for a guy who's always pointing out that Ronaldo's younger years as a winger skews their whole career stats comparison, you're being especially hypocritical here, since you're now comparing stats of players 28 months apart.
Ronaldo at the same age as Messi had 17 fewer goals in KO rounds than him, that puts him just 2 goals above Messi, you can't use the fact that he was playing in a worse team for the whole of his career to defend his league record and then use the UCL KO goals to fit your narrative better, when he's played in probably the best team in the history of the modern UCL with 3 titles and a semis in 4 years. In two seasons (and one game now) he has scored 30% of his KO round goals after a 10 year career playing those games.
You're using this Real Madrid UCL run (almost an statistical abnormality) to declare he's the best at something in a skewed form, you could wait to see how many goals Leo scores in the next two seasons if you wanted to be fair to him, like you ask people to do with Ronaldo whole career numbers, or you could use the goal per game ratio.
Ronaldo 0.81 current (0.73 at 30)
Messi 0.63
But, of course, doesn't sound as good as showing raw amount of goals to make us buy the idea that he's almost two times the goalscorer Leo is in the knockout rounds but not talk about games played. 0.10 at the same stage in their career is your "big difference".
And rest assured, his knockout records are there to stay, I'm not using this post to say Messi will match him in this area in the next 2 seasons, first because even at 30 y/o, Ronaldo was already a little better than him at this stat, and second because while Ronaldo has stepped forward in his team formation to help his team finishing more but building up less, Messi is showing that he'll do the opposite, play deeper in his team and further away from the goal. Equalling the career global KO goals would be a hard feat to do for Messi even in his 2008/2014 form, but it's totally out of the picture for his current version, also hard to believe he'd win 2 more UCL titles to play 15 games in the next 2 seasons.
So, they were basically equal as goalscorers in the UCL in their best years, in the future Messi could close the gap to 33 y/o Ronaldo numbers but probably won't get close to them unless he outlasts his career, but you could be fair and honest with yourself, if you're going to maintain your position on their global career saying that Messi is only a better career goalscorer because Cris played deeper in his first seasons and had worse teams, you could stop with the hyperbole and say that it's only logical that Ronaldo could end up outscoring Leo in the next years, as Messi starts doing the same thing Ronaldo did earlier, instead of bashing him with double-edged stats.