Cristiano Ronaldo ~ Your Favorite Player Is So Much Better!! Thread

It's quite obvious. He's as good as a goalscorer as Haaland and Kane. Maybe better cause he scores on the biggest stages and against the best teams. On the other hand he's a better dribbler/ball carrier than both. He's as good as Vini Jr at dribbling. He also assists more than Haaland and as much as Kane or Vini. So between all the forwards of his generation he's the most complete. Yamal is better at dribbling but he's very far from Mbappé at goalscoring. He's the complete package. Let's say he has the most Tools in his "Bat belt". Not only this but his tools are the best ones. Also, It's no use having all these tools if you don't turn them into something. Mbappé is the player with the most goals in the Champions League since his debut. It's not like Ibra, who was far below his peers. Furthermore, he won a World Cup and was the top scorer in the last one, scoring two goals in the final. Nobody of his generation comes close to him in terms of everything he brings to the table on the pitch, added to his achievements.

 

You keep repeating “football is a collective sport” as if saying it louder turns it into an argument. No one disputes that premise. What you still fail to do is draw a correct conclusion from it.

Yes, football is collective. No, that does not imply that elite individuals are interchangeable within elite collectives. That leap is where your reasoning collapses.

Let’s address your Benzema example properly, because this is where your argument sounds convincing only if you ignore timelines, roles, and causality.

Real Madrid did not win another Champions League just after Cristiano left. They won it four years later, after:

1-rebuilding the squad,

2-Benzema changing his role completely,

3-Vinícius emerging,

4-Courtois delivering one of the greatest GK campaigns in UCL history,

5-and Madrid surviving multiple knockout rounds by margins that were historically abnormal.

Now here’s the key point you keep dodging:
Benzema did not replace Cristiano’s function.
He replaced the absence of a system that no longer existed.

For nine years, Madrid was structurally built around one thing: Cristiano’s output. Benzema was explicitly a facilitator during that period. Tactically, spatially, and statistically. That’s documented in heat maps, shot distribution, assist profiles, and tactical setups under multiple managers.

When Cristiano left, Madrid didn’t say “now Benzema will do the same thing.” They changed the way the team played. That alone disproves your “plug-and-play elite striker” theory.

And here’s the fatal blow to your argument:
If Benzema could have “done almost the same as Cristiano for years,” then why didn’t he do it when Cristiano wasn’t there in the same competitive environment?

Benzema’s peak UCL season came at 34, not in his athletic prime.

It came once, not repeatedly.

It came with an entirely different role and context.

And it did not produce sustained dominance.

Cristiano, meanwhile, was decisive:

at United,

then immediately decisive at Madrid,

across multiple squads,

across different tactical structures,

across a decade of Champions League campaigns.

That’s repeatable, transferable, asymmetrical impact.

You accuse others of simplistic thinking, yet your entire framework reduces football to a binary:

collective > individual → therefore individuals are comparable

That’s flattening reality until it fits your conclusion.

Yes, the team matters more than the individual in isolation.
But history is shaped by individuals who consistently tilt collectives beyond their baseline. That’s why:

Madrid with Cristiano ≠ Madrid without Cristiano

Portugal with Cristiano ≠ Portugal before Cristiano

UCL knockouts with Cristiano ≠ UCL knockouts without him

Calling people “low IQ” for pointing that out just signals that you’re confusing abstraction with intelligence.

Football is collective.
Impact is not evenly distributed.
And pretending otherwise is denial dressed up as maturity.

 

You are writing too much for this guy. Literally wasting your time. His argument about CR7 after he left Madrid is terrible and does he bring up that Madrid was stuck losing in the Round of 16 for years before he got there? No. Does he mention that Man U never won a Champions League again after Ronaldo left? No.

And regarding these two points, I’m not even going to claim he’s intentionally hiding them. I genuinely believe he hasn’t thought about them. That’s how shallow his critical thinking is.

He literally condescends to such a degree rarely seen here - “Ah, yes, I remember when I was unenlightened and thought CR7 was good. But I live on a different plane of reality now. Only children think CR7 is great. And yes I love to smell my own farts.”

 

Cristiano was literally playing in the best team in the world. One can acknowledge the merit of being an important player (even the most important one) in those teams. The intellectual delusion you commit is thinking that ‘Cristiano won this and that,’ because, again, if you know that if Cristiano had played on a different team he would not have won the Champions League, then you have to realize that you cannot use that as an objective measure. You can’t say ‘Player A won 5 Champions Leagues and Player B won none, therefore Player A is better. Player B can be better than Player A. Do you know why? Because they play on different teams, and because their situations are different, yet you analyze it in a simplistic, lazy, and erroneous way.

What you say about Real Madrid losing in the Round of 16 in earlier years is, again, a wrong conclusion. How good were those teams? How balanced were the european teams in those eras? It’s a very different context. The Benzema case is much more accurate because you’re talking about the same era, with an elite squad in every area, a context similar to Cristiano’s. And when an aging Benzema got his first real chance to be the center of the team, he produced a performance at that level and won the Champions League, literally replicating what Cristiano had already done. There you have it.

 

You are literally saying “You cannot base your argument on reality (what CR7 has actually won) if you know he wouldn’t have won it for another team (literally fantasy - a scenario that never happened).”

You know exactly how scenarios that didn’t happen would happen? Really? Are you God? Cool, you can keep trying to play God and basing your conclusions on realities that haven’t happened but the rest of us will stick to the facts - things that have happened - actual reality. I’m not replying to you anymore. I genuinely think you have something wrong with the way your mind operates and anything after this is an actual waste of my time.

I am not thinking “Cristiano won this and that”, Cristiano DID win this this and that. Seriously, seek help. You are untethered from actual reality.

Winning cannot be used as an objective measure he says. Literal lunacy. Literally arguing that reality can’t be used as evidence because hypotheticals might contradict it. What intellectual depravity you represent.

 

The g/a output of all those players relative to their teams is very similar, so there’s nothing special about Cristiano there either, very good, yes, but you have 20–30 similar players.
The problem is that the conditions in which current players compete are unique. You do know that never before in the history of football have there been super teams like the ones we have now, right? That completely changes the context. Why don’t you analyze the level of teammates Cristiano (and Messi) had compared to other players?

Your entire analysis is flawed because you ignore the unique historical context of modern football. Obviously, a player from the 90s would not be able to do something like that, because teams were more balanced, and since in football everything is relative to the collective, that has to be taken into account much more. Even today, you have only a few teams at the level of Real Madrid; that is, only a small handful of players in the entire world could even be in circumstances somewhat similar to those of Cristiano or Messi.

 

Mentioning “context” doesn't settles the debate. Context is a variable that still has to be measured. Saying that many elite attackers have “similar G/A relative to their teams” only works if you deliberately ignore where, when, and against whom those contributions occur. Raw proportionality tells you volume, not leverage. Cristiano’s output was concentrated in the highest leverage matches, in the hardest competition, year after year. Knockout rounds, late stages, away legs, finals. Plenty of elite forwards post similar ratios over seasons but very few sustain that level of decisiveness in the Champions League knockouts across a decade. That’s the separator you keep abstracting away.

On the “super teams” claim. This is where your argument actually turns against itself. Yes, modern football has stronger squads at the top. It just raises the elimination threshold. When everyone around you is elite, marginal superiority matters even more. Being the decisive difference in a stacked environment is harder, because the opponent is also stacked.

If super teams automatically produced interchangeable stars, then:

Ibrahimović would have dominated Europe

Neymar would have led PSG to a UCL

Prime Bale would have matched Cristiano’s European impact

Multiple Madrid attackers would have taken turns being “that guy”

They didn’t. One player consistently did.

And about teammates: Cristiano coexisted with elite teammates without diluting his impact. That’s rare. Plenty of great players see their numbers, influence, or centrality drop when surrounded by other stars. Cristiano didn’t. He absorbed pressure, attention, and responsibility while others rotated around him.

Your whole claim that 90s players “couldn’t do this” because teams were more balanced is a convenient hypothetical and an unprovable one. What we can evaluate is performance relative to contemporaries in the same era. And relative to his contemporaries, Cristiano is an outlier in:

longevity at elite output

knockout stage influence

adaptability across leagues and systems

and sustained centrality in title winning teams

Your scarcity argument that “only a handful of players could even be in those circumstances” again cuts the wrong way. If the pool is that small, and one player repeatedly separates himself within that pool, that’s greatness surviving filtration.

You’re right about one thing: football is relative.
What you keep missing is what it’s relative to.

Cristiano is extraordinary because among players with comparable teammates, resources, and opportunities, he consistently produced outcomes others didn’t. Not because he played for great teams

Context doesn’t erase hierarchy.

 

"Reality can’t be used as evidence because hypotheticals might contradict it"
-Trachta10, probably

lol You made me laugh a lot.

 

Your low intellectual level is truly a shame. Real Madrid and Manchester won the Champions League, and Cristiano was part of those teams, if he had played for weaker teams, he would never have won anything. The fact that he wouldn't have won anything doesn't change how good or bad he was as a player.

 

Argentina won a World Cup without Diego Maradona even on the plane(1978)


Argentina never won the Copa America with Diego Maradona

They won it twice when he was banned for being a crackhead(in 1991 and 1993)


Argentinos juniors never won the Copa libertadores with Diego Maradona

They won it 5 years after he left(1985)


Boca juniors never won the Copa libertadores with Maradona

They won it two seasons before he joined(1978)

Barcelona never won a European trophy with Diego Maradona
They won a European trophy the season before he joined( the cup winners cup in 1981/82)

Barcelona never won La Liga title with Diego Maradona

They won it the season after he left(1984/85)

Trachta the Argentine extremist won’t tell you that Real Madrid won the European Cup two seasons after Alfredo Di stefano left(in 1966)


He won’t mention that two of the five hat-tricks in Benzema’s entire Real Madrid career came in the 2021/22 Champions League.

The notion that 2021/22 Benzema was a true reflection of the player he had always been is nothing more than delusional rambling.


What happened when he met Ajax 2018/19 playing with the exact same support cast Ronaldo had the previous year?


Why did Real Madrid score 94 goals in La Liga 17/18 and 63 goals in La Liga 2018/19?


Why did Cristiano Ronaldo score 15 Champions League goals in 2017/18 playing for Real Madrid while Benzema managed 15 CL goals only across 2018/19, 2019/20, and 2020/21 combined playing for the exact same team?



He wants to jump straight to the outlier in Benzema’s career, but he conveniently ignores everything that came before it.


He’s happy to highlight Napoli’s success with Diego Maradona, yet conveniently omits that every other team Maradona played for including his national side were actually way more successful without him than with him.


Cristiano averaged 14 CL goals per season for 5 consecutive seasons between 2012/13 and 2017/18

In his last 5 seasons for Real Madrid Cristiano Ronaldo scored 70 CL goals

Benzema played 5 more seasons for Real Madrid after Cristiano left and scored 34 CL goals

This guy is shameless

 

Just because Benzema did it once in a blue moon he really think he would sustain it for 10 years like Ronaldo if only he were the focal point of real Madrid lol when in fact he became the focal point of real Madrid just when Ronaldo left and he barely could quite score half the goals Ronaldo scored with exactly the same team but without Ronaldo

 

How do you know the reality? If you’re going to compare players, you have to take their specific contexts into account, because contexts between eras and even between teams change enormously. You can play dumb and ignore those factors, but you know they are fundamental.
You should know that if Cristiano had played about 20 years earlier, he wouldn’t have scored as many goals and wouldn’t have won even half of what he won, if he had played on weaker teams, he wouldn’t have won almost anything, yet he would have been the same player.
If you want to make a real analysis between players from different eras, you have to consider those factors, and when you do, you realize that 90% of Cristiano’s greatness comes from the unique circumstances of this time. If you take that into account, I could name at least 10 players who were as good as or better than Cristiano.

 

1. I do not mind systematically drilled movements that increases odds of winning. This is not an arts show where individual creativity, for the sheer sake of it, merits more respect in terms of functionality.

2. Eye-test is relatively speaking, more optimized for entertainment, and spectator experience, not analysis. It is why those with massive emphasis on the eye-test, are sort of measuring football via a specific filter for me.

3. I value the ability to create plays with the ball at your feet. We all do to an extent. There is not a single person on this forum who does not get fascinated with this particular aspect of the game.

It is literally game-breaking in nature and it does not require sustained focus or analysis. It happens, and there are immediate consequences involved. It is entirely fundamental to how we remember and analyze reality.

However, I clearly dislike extra emphasis on it to the extent where it becomes to the go-to metric, because it is easier to observe, and that is how humans usually perceive reality and store data from it.

Basically, I am saying, if we use the perfect functional analysis machine for football, don't you agree it will sort of deviate from human analysis that is heavily based on flawed camera angles, and more incentivized to remember moments, rather than the entire block that builds up to that moment?

That is my honest feeling on the eye-test. I cannot delve much deeper into the details of it, because it is more of a gut feeling.

 

I guess the harshness of some of the critiques may be unwarranted, but for me, there may be a mild cognitive dissonance between what you believe as a person, and the manner in which you present the numbers.

If you truly believe the universal application of the ways you fine-tune the numbers to your liking, can you sort of do a blind test for a whole variety of cases?

Like, take a couple of modern day examples, that do not require hypothetical imaginary historical reconstruction of their reality, and see if the numbers truly adjust for the strengths of the teammates, the varying usage rates and resource-demand of the players, as well as the their overall contribution, not just goals.

I am not familiar enough with your approach, or dedicated enough to run the numbers myself, but I get the feeling the numbers will do quite a mediocre job of recognizing the best 100 players of today, maybe even below the likes of algorithms set by Sofascore.

Then when you proclaim your rather strong statements, on hypothetical scenarios, based on your statistical approach, it can and will induce rage in people who are insulted by the results. Also notice the weird level of conviction in the numbers despite the imperfect nature of it, are you sure you do not have bias? Scientists have trouble making such conclusive statements from much more solid data, and fundamentally sound statistics that are checked from multiple angles. It seems to me the conviction comes from your perception, not the numbers, and the numbers is simply the way you communicate.

Just my thoughts. More thoroughness and humility for the statistical analysis, and less conviction and agenda driven analysis from those numbers. You clearly have passion for the game, I just want more intellectual integrity, even if we all fall short of it.

 

The issue isn't that context is being ignored, it's that you’re using it as a universal solvent to dissolve individual greatness. By arguing that a player’s resume collapses once you strip away their specific era, teammates, and sports science, you create a counterfactual trap that applies to every legend in history. If we follow your logic where R9 is defined by his injuries, Messi by his ecosystem, and Van Basten by his longevity, we reach a point of total analytical abdication where every career becomes "unknowable." This brand of relativism ends the debate, because if everyone’s success is merely a byproduct of their circumstances, then no one can ever truly be exceptional.

Your claim that 90% of Cristiano’s impact is situational is flatly contradicted by his unrivaled transferability across three different major leagues and multiple tactical eras. If his greatness were a fragile product of a specific environment, his elite output would have cratered when he moved from the Premier League to La Liga, or when he transitioned to Serie A in his late 30s. Instead, he consistently exceeded the baseline of the world’s most highly filtered talent pool, outperforming the very contemporaries who shared his same structural advantages. True context adjusted analysis identifies the rare few who tilted the highest level of competition regardless of the variables around them

 

I’m not even talking about statistics in my last points. My argument is that many people do not properly take into account (or they conveniently ignore it) how football has changed in each era. I’m not talking about the game itself, but rather about things like the concentration of the best players in the world in a few leagues, the number of titles that exist today that didn’t exist before, the number of goals scored nowadays, which in the ’80s and ’90s was about half, and in the ’50s and ’60s was much higher than it is today, as well as factors like longevity and advances in medicine. If we’re supposed to be trying to make an honest analysis of players, you have to take all of those factors into account.

When I started analyzing these kinds of things, I realized that many preconceived ideas I had were wrong. I was struck by how relative and dependent individual performance was on the team, for example (when measured with basic statistics). So if a player’s performance is so dependent on the team, what happens if I have a "good" player on the best team in the world, and the greatest player in history on an average team? Those questions are fascinating and should interest anyone, because ultimately football is a collective sport, and that’s where the analysis becomes so complex.

My point is that when you start analyzing each player within their own context, in their own club, in their own era, taking their role into account, and so on, things balance out quite a lot.
Of course Cristiano Ronaldo is a great player, my point is that there are many others at similar levels. Saying that Zico, Puskás, Van Basten, Ronaldo, are inferior to Cristiano is simply refusing to make a serious analysis.

 

We all agree that football across eras isn’t directly comparable without rigorous adjustment and factors like talent concentration, sports science, and goal environments must be accounted for in any serious analysis. On that, we are in total agreement. Where we diverge is your use of "contextual relativization" as a convergence mechanism. You treat context as if it inherently balances everyone out, but that is an assumption rather than an analytical law. While individual output is team dependent, dependence doesn’t imply interchangeability. A violin needs an orchestra, but not every violinist produces the same effect. Your thought experiments often trade empirical grounding for philosophical speculation, but hypotheticals cannot retroactively flatten the reality of what actually happened on the pitch.

The core issue is that while context compresses gaps, it does not erase them. You suggest that once we analyze players like Zico, Puskás, or Van Basten in their own contexts, they all arrive at a similar level. However, that conclusion doesn't follow from the premise because even within those specific contexts, players separate. Van Basten separated briefly before his injury, Zico separated domestically, Cristiano separated through sustained, cross context dominance across different leagues and eras. If contextual analysis always leads to a "balance" of equality, then greatness becomes a meaningless metric and no one, not Pelé, Maradona, or Messi can ever be ranked. Acknowledging a hierarchy is a refusal to let that complexity dissolve the reality of elite impact into a false sense of sameness

 

In my mind, I sort have a standard distribution for each eras or competition, and try to notice who was more of the outlier. For example, if Gerd Muller had inflated numbers due to the higher goals per game within the Bundesliga, how much further away was he from the rest of his contemporary Bundesliga peers?

For example, if Cristiano Ronaldo is of interest to you, what sort of teams, judged via Elo team ratings disparity (maybe there are other ways of measurement), qualify as a super teams that make competition unfair? Surely it is relative no? Even if Johan Cruyff played for a weaker team in Ajax from a sheer teammate quality point of view, maybe his domestic competition were even further away in terms of strength measured by Elo disparity.

There are so many ways to check, but it seems you have already made up your mind. The conviction with which you back you statements based on personal wisdoms that you have gathered through the years, are proof enough for you and you alone. Wisdoms gained through personal gut feel and perception is not science or analysis. It is just intuition and feel.

What is the basis with which you feel Cristiano Ronaldo has met teams far below the standard of his own, at a rate that accounts for 90% of his career? For example, if we compare the Elo points for the competitive schedule of all players, does Cristiano Ronaldo somehow stand out as the ultimate beneficiary? Because that is what it sounds like to me, from what you are insinuating.

You have to state something that goes beyond your intuition to match your convictions, to convince those who oppose you, otherwise you are just here to spam comments about how people are just too dumb to match your insight.

 

No. What I argue is that things balance out, but not into a total relativism where all players are equal. If Haaland has 1 goal per game and Van Basten 0.5 goals per game, my position is that they are close, maybe Haaland is better, maybe Van Basten is. The point is understanding that they are much closer than the raw numbers suggest.

The other point is that talking about achievements as if they were individual in a collective sport is obviously stupid if you don’t analyze all the variables. The number of titles can add to a player’s "historical greatness" but it requires context.

 

That method doesn’t convince me because a player depends primarily on his team, on his teammates and on how he directly interacts with them. What the other teams in the league do is secondary, it’s a more distant factor. If a player plays for Real Madrid, he will have far more chances to score than a player who plays for Eibar, even though both are in the same league.

When I analyze players’ g/a relative to their team’s total goals, the proportion is very stable. One could, for example, add more indicators and create some kind of index, for instance, giving credit to a player who plays on a stronger team or who faces stronger opponents. The problem is that you then enter very subjective territory that is difficult to measure. Elo is the best option, but those data only exist for European football.

 

I would say what you measure might be a reflection of a player's tendencies also, in terms of demanding the ball. If a player demands a lot of the ball, it might be a better indicator of how much if the ball a player sees and dictates, rather than what they add in terms of results. I remember reading somewhere that Trent-Alexander Arnold has a relatively high usage rate compared to his actual goal creating actions.

Basically, how do you differentiate a ball hog, who makes sure that the game is revolved around them, and a player who adds value without much demand for the ball? Maybe a ball hog adds minimally to a team overall, but is awesome at increasing the team's dependence on his on-the-ball talent.

Like how are you aware of all the things, to comment so strongly? What is the data? I would at least go over the European data before commenting that Zlatan Ibrahimovic would have the same success as Cristiano Ronaldo in the Champions League if given the same teammates.

I recognize it is easy to critique analysis from afar without adding your own, but sometimes, you venture a lot with your own opinions, and base that around assumptions, and label it is analysis that us simpleton cannot comprehend. It can be pretty infuriating, to be quite frank with you.

 

yes ,

In my case

Nowadays

Honestly
I no longer comment
on what I think so
or should think so. Honestly, it doesn't matter for anyone here .

I only report the concrete facts that I see or have seen in the entire matches.
the main details ...

Honestly speaking to you !


i agree with you dear mate on this . !

 

Ibra ...


played in great Teams also ..

Ajax .... 2003 .. was a very very good Team .......

for example Juventus de Turin


with

Patrick Vieira
Fabio Cannavaro
Thuram
Buffon
Nedved
Del Piero ...

2004-2006 ..


INter Milan ........ 2006-2009 ....

Adriano Drunk
Crespo


Barcelona .......... 2009-2010 ......

Ac Milan Galacticos version ....... 2011-2012


Psg .........



won ... Uefa Champions League ???????









you wish ...Ibra playing ...with Pelé , Maradona , Cruyff , Di Stefano , Beckenbauer , Gerd Muller ..and Gullit to win the Uefa Champions League .......... ???

Imagine then

Ibra playing for Steaua Bucharest in place of Hagi...

 

So

you yourself confirm
that Ibra wouldn't make any difference playing for Steaua Bucharest like Hagi did it in 1988-1989 European Champions Cup season ???

 

1. It is not just drilling of patterned movement on training pitch, it is even more fundamental than that in formation itself. It is not just movement itself, it is positioning relative teammates that creates spaces by default. These things are coordinated and designed on a drawing board long before kick off.

2. Sure, but the opposite is true as well. Talking about off the ball movement and "hidden" value of players on the pitch that is not seen by eye-test? What do you think that culminates to?

For an attacker, for example, it culminates primarly towards scoring more goals.

And then tell me, is there enough emphasis amongst football fans or casual fans on goals scored by a player?

Just look at this forum.

Most of functional off the ball movement is already captured by a single metric that is by far the most emphasized data of all.

And the rest of the off the ball movement that is functional but not captured by goal stats is ironically only capturable by an eye-test, that should be less emphasized per your post?

How does that work?

By undermining eye-test, you are going just to the other extreme and overemphasizing measurable output.

The problem is not overemphasizing eye-test, but inability to discern what matters and what doesn't when using eye-test. Because you can actually watch football and not be seduced by on-ball fanciness. It is a discernment issue, not a focus issue.