When you see a stat like that, doesn't it occur to you that maybe goal ratio isn't that meaningful a statistic?
Messi v Ronaldo | Contains double your daily salt allowance
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When you see a stat like that, doesn't it occur to you that maybe goal ratio isn't that meaningful a statistic?
Messi has scored 10 or more goals in the CL five times and Ronaldo has done it 11 times. It's not trivial.
It's also extremely difficult if you're not playing for clubs that dominate the competition, because if you crash out in the R16 it's gonna be hard to get 10 goals. Ronaldo has played a ludicrous amount of CL semifinals.
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Of course I am not expecting he would break this, but let’s say next season he would join a club of his choice, it could be City or Real or PSG, which means the chance of him advancing further on each CL campaign would be higher. And assume he would stay injury free for most of the time, he could have played avg around 10 CL games each season. His current ratio is more than a goal per game, so the chance for him reaching that number is there.
But there are lots of conditions he have to meet in order to achieve such feat - staying consistent and keeping same level of goalscoring form over next 12 years, would be the hardest part. Staying injury free for so long would be a challenge too. Also, he would be target/man marked heavily in future, when every defenders know his game well. That would make it harder for him to keep up that rate.
The only similarity is when you compare a 30+ year old version of Ronaldo with Muller.
Messi was initially a winger as well
Goal ratio is meaningful. Like any stat it requires context but you can’t say it’s not meaningful.
Cost more than all of those apart from City.
I dont think their style is similar at all.
But that’s the point. United have changed the way they play to accommodate Ronaldo which has led to other guys not scoring as much. Bruno’s goals have dried up. Greenwood was looking a promising line leader early on, then Ronaldo turned up and his goals dried up. I mean, are we saying that these guys have all mysteriously just become crap?
Yeah it’s not
If it requires context then I can say that without context it is meaningless.
All stats require context
Until Messi comes and struts his stuff in the Premiership there is no debate .. clearly Ronaldo is the better, more rounded player…he’s done it everywhere !!
To be fair, Greenwood has worst goalscoring stat last season as compared to this one, so one could argue he actually getting better. Bruno goals dried up because we are not getting penalties this season, and his form has already been dropped since the turn of the year, long before Ronaldo arrived.
While the first few games this season has been mostly easy game (ie Everton, Leeds, Southampton), even Pogba has crazy stats during those games, I am not sure if it’s good to use those as benchmark as to our other games (Liverpool, City, Chelsea, Leicester etc). You know, beating the likes of Leeds or Everton for 4-5 goals, doesn’t mean we would do the same same against the likes of Liverpool, City or Chelsea.
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Of course he would. He had a goal a game record against English sides in the Champions League. David Silva went to England and talked about how it was easier than Spain to find gaps in the half spaces. Silva was outstanding, and Messi is several times better than Silva.
Barcelona are not some random team with some random tactics.
Messi destroyed English teams the same way the Spanish National Team just controlled the game against every other country.
Messi just made the already hard near impossible
So many 4-0 losses against English teams as the "Spanish National Team slowly disappeared from Barcelona".
Anyway, no use - its not going to change your mind or mine, I just speak to make sure not just bullshit gets believed by the neutrals, I'm sure just like you do too.
He scored against the best team in England in the CL this year, he scored 2 goals against Liverpool in 2019 CL semi-finals, he scored 2 goals against United in the 2019 quarter-finals. The Barcelona midfield against Liverpool was Busquets, Rakitic and Vidal. Liverpool dominated midfield and had 52% of the ball.
Maybe so. You did have the losses against Villa and Watford as well though. I accept what you said about Greenwood.
Hasn't done it in France
The "he hasn't done it in the PL!!" argument is pretty boring. Always the same thing when players come from abroad, I remember the same thing about Thiago Silva and he's now confortably a starter in a top3 team at 36 years old.
As it was mentionned, Messi scored 27 goals against United/City/Liverpool/Spurs/Chelsea/Arsenal and he did it in 37 games.
Ronaldo has 33 goals in.... 86 games.
As it was mentionned, Messi scored 27 goals against United/City/Liverpool/Spurs/Chelsea/Arsenal and he did it in 37 games.
Ronaldo has 33 goals in.... 86 games.
Zidane did not play in the EPL, guess Lampard is better than Zidane according to these folks
It's pretty funny because there's still this "not strong enough for PL, he won't handle the intensity and the hits" argument despite the fact that players like Hazard or Bernardo Silva ripped PL clubs appart on numerous occasions.
Doesn’t that just mean they were strong enough? Hazard especially was a mini tank
But it doesn't count because Messi only did it while playing for Barca! As Bebestation will say
Or that means that PL isn't a different sport like most PL fan think. It's better for sure but you have a lot of players like Foden, Salah, Jorginho etc. that are not particulary strong and fare very well in the PL.
Messi's goal record against top PL teams is the obvious proof that he would have destroyed the league like he did in spain.
Who are you talking to? That's not what people are saying. Barca has always been one of the top teams in the world, and they are built around him. At one point they had one of the greatest sides in the history of the game. None of this seems to matter when all you look at is how Messi fared against other sides. Can Barca move to the PL?
It is truly amazing how many PL fans think like this. You’re not exaggerating at all! You can take a player who’s been great in another league (all other leagues are shit of course), great in the champions league and great at international level and you will genuinely find people saying “well he hasn’t done it against Burnley, so can we really be sure?” The Sky Sports brainwashing is truly a wonder to behold. And I’m not just talking about Messi either. I’ve heard people take this asinine line of thinking about players like Lewandowski (because the German league is crap), Neymar (because the Brazilian, French and Spanish leagues are crap) etc etc.
Honestly, that's a very valid question that even some Messi fans probably wondered from time to time. It's not the same as belittling him because he doesn't face PL teams week in week out. It's more about being outside his comfort zone.
When someone questions whether Messi would have achieved the same in England as he did in Spain, people often cite examples of one-off or two-legged games Barca played against English clubs in the Champion's League or laugh it off with the rainy night in Stoke cliché. I can't help but feel that's somewhat missing the point. The question is how would he have dealt with playing week-in, week-out in a team which didn't have his DNA and style of play running through it, in a more intense, more physically demanding league and/or one where money and quality is more evenly distributed throughout the league.
It's a valid question as long as people aren't using it to back an agenda, which they usually are. Personally, I think it's doubtful that Messi's trophy haul and goal stats would look the same if he'd spent more of his career away from Spain, but for me that's where the difference would have ended. He'd still have been the best player in whatever league he was in and the best footballer in the world, although I suspect that Ronaldo would be way out in front in terms of goals scored. I think half the tension in this debate is that there's every chance Messi could overtake Ronaldo in terms of goals scored and if that happens the stats-obsessed nature of online football debate means that only way people could convincingly argue that Ronaldo is the best at anything would be by appealing to the idea that it all would have been different if Messi hadn't spent the majority of his career at Barca.
It's a valid question as long as people aren't using it to back an agenda, which they usually are. Personally, I think it's doubtful that Messi's trophy haul and goal stats would look the same if he'd spent more of his career away from Spain, but for me that's where the difference would have ended. He'd still have been the best player in whatever league he was in and the best footballer in the world, although I suspect that Ronaldo would be way out in front in terms of goals scored. I think half the tension in this debate is that there's every chance Messi could overtake Ronaldo in terms of goals scored and if that happens the stats-obsessed nature of online football debate means that only way people could convincingly argue that Ronaldo is the best at anything would be by appealing to the idea that it all would have been different if Messi hadn't spent the majority of his career at Barca.
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A good team would have found a way to adjust to Messi's skills, or he would have. He's VERY different from the player he was 10-15 years ago and it's hard to say that playing at Barcelona was a "confort zone" for a couple of years, the team got worse and worse.
And there is absolutely nothing that suggests Rolnaldo would be way out in terms of goals scored, actually, Messi is far more comfortable than Cristiano in tight spaces and against low blocks.
Also, Liga at its best was a pretty demanding league, and they had to be on top of their game everyweek to avoid loosing the title to Real Madrid (and sometimes atletico). And Barcelona has been way more consistant than Real Madrid in liga throughout the last decade, even after the end of the golden Pep era.
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Yep, what was David Silva better at than Messi? It certainly wasn’t strength anyway. David Silva is maybe weaker physically than Messi and is considered one of the best PL players of his generation. Messi is way better than Silva ever was.
It's all opinions at the end of the day. On your first paragraph, I think the idea that any other club could have provided Messi with a platform that played to his strengths as effectively as Barcelona (where most of his teammates and coaches came through the same academy as him) has over the last 18 years, is patently daft. That's not a criticism of Messi and it's certainly not a tick for Ronaldo, it's just being realistic. Outside of the very adversarial world of this thread, saying Messi is the best in the world and that Barcelona's set-up gave him a near perfect environment to perform to his best ability wouldn't be particularly controversial or seen as in any way contradictory.
On your second paragraph, again it's my opinion and you're welcome to disagree. If you don't agree with the assertion above, that playing for Barca in La Liga was beneficial to Messi's personal form and suited him more than playing for another club in another league would have done, I wouldn't expect you to agree with the conclusion that he'd have scored fewer goals if he hadn't spent his career there.
To repeat and sort of summarise my thoughts, I think Messi was better than Ronaldo, and that he would have been better than Ronaldo wherever he'd spent his career. However, I don't think Messi would have scored as many goals as he has if he'd spent half of his career away from Barca, and since I know Ronaldo has scored more than him as it stands, it logically follows that I reckon Messi wouldn't be as near Ronaldo in that specific regard were that the case. Luckily for Messi, and his fans, if Ronaldo were to end his career with more goals, it wouldn't magically make Ronaldo the better footballer. Les Ferdinand scored more goals than Cantona, it doesn't mean he was a better footballer. It's probably my fault for coming into this nuance-vacuum of a thread and expecting to be able to say anything about either player that wouldn't get jumped on.
Love the "you're welcome to disagree but you people are stupid if you do" vibe here. Nobody knows what would have happened had Messi joined City 5 years ago for exemple, and there's chances that it would have played more to his strenghts than Henrique's post 2015 Barcelona (and i'm not even talking about Valverde, Setien or Koeman). Messi had to gradually move to a playmaker over the years, and it's not only because he got older but also because Barcelona's midfield was insufficient. Had he joined a team with better midfielders, he could have played higher on the pitch to score more goals. So there is absolutely nothing "daft" about thinking that he could have found a better plateform, at least in the past few years.
What do you mean "these kind of posts"?
I think it's a little disingenuous to argue that any club could better cater to Messi than the club he knew inside out and had been at since he was a child. Barcelona have set up to get the best out of him for a decade or so, so is it much of a stretch to assume that a club that has to a large extent built its success upon his abilities may be the best place for him to perform?
Yeah sorry there was no need for the tone, I was reacting to your 'there is absolutely nothing that suggests...' from the previous post which I read as snarky and went overboard with the snark in return, apologies.
I guess what I'd say in reposte to your post is that your point only really holds up if you dismiss all the arguments I've made out of hand and then carefully cherrypick when Messi's hypothetical Premier League move happens. Otherwise it turns into a massive can of worms and undermines your argument because someone else could very easily turn round and say "well no-one knows what would have happened if he'd joined City in 2009 and spent 3 seasons playing with Gareth Barry instead of scoring 180 goals at Barca in the best club team of all time". If you follow that logic to its conclusion you end up arguing against yourself because for more than half of Messi's massively productive years Barcelona have been better than any English team, so it logically follows that had he'd spent his career at an English team he'd have scored fewer goals than he did at Barca.
But, to be clear, that's the logical conclusion of your argument rather than mine. My point was simply that until this year Messi has always played for a club whose style of play was built around his strengths, alongside players coached to amplify his strengths, in a league which is better suited to his strengths and less punishing of his weaknesses than others, and whilst outside of that environment he still would have been the best in the world it's possible (I'd say likely) that he wouldn't quite have churned out the stats he has at Barca.
Exactly this. I honestly think this could have been Messi 5 years ago, away from Barca and caring very little. It’s not as if he is on the slide now, he’s the reigning Ballon Dor winner and is arguable better now that he was back then.
He could have went to England, strolled about and noped right out of there where the intensity demands you to work hard and run
I think the fact that Ronaldo has done it in the top leagues of the world pretty much closes the argument. There's always those who will come up with could have would have etc. but those remain unproven hypothesis. Not for a moment saying that Messi did not have what it takes to tear it apart in new leagues if he did move earlier in his career. But we will never have the data now to prove it.
I am not a messi fan. For me his biggest achievement is to send barca indirectly to Europa because he bankrupted them .
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