It’s tougher to hit the crossbar from the halfway line than to pass the ball accurately in short distances. Doesn’t make it more important to a game of football though does it? The difficulty of it or the amount of talent it takes isn’t really relevant.
Lots of people can head a football, next no none can do it as consistently and as effectively as Cristiano Ronaldo does. Thousands of players could have played the ball Kroos played, very few have the athleticism to jump over Alex Sandro and the awareness and heading ability to lay it off the way he did. Fellaini and Mandzukic made a career out of bullying fullbacks in the air, it’s a tremendously effective tool.
Here’s a Mandzukic and Ronaldo vídeo on it I saw a couple of days ago.
I don’t believe that in any way makes it better, just more different and more exciting to watch. It’s like watching Djokovic and Federer play tennis, Federer is magic but there’s an art to perfecting the consistent elements of the sport too. They’ll end their careers with about the same success as eachother but Federer will have 10 times the admiration of the public.
As for the first part of that, the situations aren’t different, they’re the same situations. They just go about it to create danger in very different ways. The way Juventus and Barcelona attack couldn’t be more different.
There's not thousands of players that can play the ball like Kroos, Bernardeschi or Bale do in some of those crosses, there's indeed a special thing about Ronaldo's aerial prowess, in modern football if you start at youth level, you could get way more players able to win headers and score like that than technical players, but there's a focus on the last ones. What makes Ronaldo weird and so specially good right now is that he can play like an old school 9 with power and height, but he's better with the ball than 99% of the players above 180cm. He shines for what you point out because it's a skill not so common now, but he's the best striker because he pairs that with being world class at everything else.
We could talk about creativity on a skill context vs creativity on a stat one, if you look at football in a logical way, to win you have to score, and to score you need to advance meters with the ball to reach the rival goal. Heading to create second plays is a way of creating chances in a "stat" way, because you need a player passing the ball to you and a second player to receive your pass, or from a cross, you need a team effort to bring the ball to hug the line, and the % of success of this play is lower than other forms of attacking, is easier to execute (as a team) but also easier to defend.
On the skill context, it would be the guy that does the long pass to Ronaldo, a reference 9 doesn't really need to read too much into the game outside the area, his job is to anchor himself in a place that everyone knows he'll do damage, but the creative player needs to free himself of marking and create his own space to launch a pass (usually by dribbling or, in Kroos way,
by commanding too much respect from defenders due to his signature move), and once that space is created, choosing the right option (sometimes the 9, other times the wingers, or passing in short), and putting a good pass (that's harder than what I think you imply in your post).
What changes from a great player like Kroos, to a legendary one like Messi, or even Iniesta on his good days, is that if you need at least 6 links in your usual "chain" of actions to score (Starts on the keeper, beat the first line of pressure, link up in the middle, put speed forward to the play, create the chance and score) a player like Kroos can make his team forget about 2, 3 links at most (if he's too deep, beats the pressure, doesn't need to link up and speeds the game opening to a wing, if he was closer to the enemy area, he skips linking, puts speed with a through ball and possibly creaters a chance), Iniesta could do an extra link on Kroos from either of those two positions, but Messi can do an extra link on Iniesta too, because he can score, so, in a chain of attack, he's more creative because he can help his team in 5 out of 6 links of the game.
Ronaldo (nowadays) creates chances that also are more represented in stats because he's weighter towards those last links (score, create the last chance, accelerate the attacking play), he helps create a lot for his team, but you can't ask him to create the lion's share of chances on the team like you should do with Kane, Messi, Neymar or Mbappe.
07-12 Ronaldo? He was almost as creative as current Messi, maybe not in such a wide area of the pitch because he was relatively anchored to the wings, for that, he would surely be regarded as the best ever had it not been not only for Messi, but Messi in that Barcelona squad, without that combination he would have...
Been in the first team to repeat a UCL title (United 2009).
"Treble" season too.
Spanish domination (5 extra La Liga titles, for a total of 7 in 9)
Probably an extra UCL (2011)
