In the end goals are only the last contact before the ball passes the line. They don't say that much about who contributed the most to it or in a greater sense which team won the game. We all know the phrase "XYZ scored the goal, but 50% of it belong to ABC". The most difficult thing in football isn't converting chances, it is creating them. That is why the historically great players were always those with exceptional dribbling and passing skills. We never valued Henry higher than Zidane, Eto'o higher than Ronaldinho, Müller higher than Beckenbauer and so forth. Thing is, the whole Ronaldo vs. Messi debate at some point got reduced to goal comparisons - Messi scored twice, Ronaldo scored a hattrick a day later, etc. But football was never viewed like this before this rivalry and that's for a reason. There's so much more to a great attacking player and Messi dwarfs Ronaldo in many of these aspects. Saying they are equal in terms of influence is like saying van Nistelroy is equal to George Best because he has greater scoring stats. In fact, it is even worse because Messi actually rivals Ronaldo's scoring stats and in fact outperforms him in terms of goals per minute.
For me, 2022 is the first time you watch Messi play football and think that he is not the best player on the pitch. Before that - regardless if he played with Xavi, Iniesta, Eto'o, Henry, Ibrahimovic, Neymar, Luis Suarez or arguably even Ronaldinho - Messi was always absolutely clearly the best player of his team. You could watch Barcelona for the first time and see it immediately. With Cristiano, that's completely different. Watch a Madrid game in their prime for the first time without any previous knowledge of the players and you'd probably be most impressed with Modric or maybe Marcelo or Kroos because they were the most dominant players, having five times the contacts of Ronaldo, playing more dangerous passes, beating more players, recycling the ball better and so forth. Ronaldo's class only becomes obvious when you follow him over the season and see that he keeps his scoring up very consistently.
This just isn't enough fo rme to be compared with the absolute gold standard which to me is Maradona, Pele, Messi and the young R9. Cristiano was very, very close to entering that echelon between 2008 and 2012 but for me every chance of him becoming the greatest ever was buried when he decided to focus on optimizing his stat sheets and not his play. I don't know if he did that to keep up with Messi on paper or if he just became obsessed with productivity but he could've been much more IMO. He probably had another 4 years at top fitness left when he went down that route.
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Heading is a weapon in a forward's arsenal in scoring, it is not a separate category like playmaking, scoring, passing. Sorry but your post is full of delusion. Even ordinary players can have amazing heading abilities. You do not see ordinary players with amazing creativity, playmaking skills, technique or dribbling skills. There is a reason football community and fans put a special emphasis on these skills, these are are football basics 101. It seems, for some Ronaldo fans, dribbling, playmaking, creativity basically all factors that put Maradona, Platini, Xavi, Zidane, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, Kaka, Cruyff among all time greats has the same importance as heading technique, jumping reach. These are the major categories where Ronaldo is not even a top 10-20 player.
