Do you understand that winning Portugal’s first 3 major trophies is a massive achievement? You seem to not be able to understand this. Ronaldo considers the Euro his best team achievement for a reason. Real Madrid’s success was not much better than that. Winning your country’s first 3 titles, when they historically had 0 is an incredible achievement that you seem to not understand.
From Google AI: Diego Simeone views Messi and Ronaldo as exceptional but different: he'd pick Ronaldo for a "normal" team needing individual brilliance to win games, while choosing Messi for a team with great players where his elaborate play thrives, essentially seeing Ronaldo as a better fit for lower-solution teams and Messi for tactically superior ones, though he'd pick Messi in a direct choice for his own team. Key Points from Simeone's View: Ronaldo's Strengths: A "warrior" who can win a game alone, providing solutions in teams with fewer attacking options, needing fewer chances to score. Messi's Strengths: Best in the world when surrounded by top players, thriving in elaborate, possession-based systems where he finds intricate solutions. The "Normal Team" Distinction: In a team with "average" players, Ronaldo's ability to create something from nothing makes him a better fit, while Messi needs strong teammates to maximize his genius. Clarification: He clarified that saying Ronaldo fits better in a normal team wasn't a slight, but a description of their different impact on varying team structures, though he'd still choose Messi if he could have either in his own attacking setup.
Yeah, and Simeone isn't the only one who says that. Several commentators say the same thing. Messi is technically better, but he needs a system designed for him where he is constantly involved. Cristiano adapts to any system or league because you don't need a complex ecosystem for him to function. He'll deliver a goal per game with basic tactics like crossing the ball into the box, etc...
Haha! How tables turn very quickly when it suits a specific, desired line of argument. I think I accused you of that years ago, probably too harshly, but I do want to say that I believe, universally, a great rule of thumb is presuming that elites of football are usually very comparable and consistent in quality era by era, and what does change is incentive structures of eras that shape how they appear as players. So era in which technical ability or creativity might be the most important, a group of world class players will demonstrate more of such traits. In other era, profile of world class players might look different - physical, tactical, etc. Shape of them is dependent on the era, but quality roughly is the same across eras. What can differ as well are the very few top outliers of an era simply because they are so few in numbers that they are not guaranteed to occur every era. But the existance of a world class level as a category/groups of palyers is basically guaranteed in my opinion. And if someone argues that a certain era is deeply lacking in talent (technical, physical,..), my first instinct would be to be skeptical of the argument and look for external circumstances that might have changed an outlook and expectations of what beibg a world class player is, rather than arguing the lack of it. I think this assumption, guaranteed presence of world class categories of similar quality, is the most reasonable starting point. Eras can have structural or otherwise lack of talent and quality in the category of world class players (or the opposite - abundance), but this for me can not be a starting point, and should have grounded, structural reasons to be believed. In the other words, analyzing eras, their should in principle be a very similar number of world class players in each of them, and I would lean more towards changing my outlook on structural incentives of an era, before asserting any one era has much more or much less "talent." It could be true, but there would have to be strong, observable, societal reasons for that. Curious, do you essentially agree?
That is a fair point to raise but it doesn’t really have much bearing on the conversation when you highlight, as you have, that without his heroic performance in a do or die game against Hungary, Portugal wouldn’t have even passed the group stage. Against Croatia, Croatia were slightly favorites. And he had a hand in the goal. Poland had a great team then and was winning that quarterfinal at first. Wales topped their group and handily defeated Belgium. They still needed him to win, that is the fulcrum point. He was in the official Team of the Tournament.
I disagree. What Cristiano Ronaldo did for the Portuguese national team alone cannot qualify him as an all-time great. Being able to help Portugal win the Euro 2016 against the odds, is not the same as being the clear best performing player across the entire tournament. For all the teams in Euro history that won the tournaments with around 8% odds, there must have been good performances from within such teams, that also did not qualify as being the clear stand-out best performance of the tournament. I cannot think of reasonable examples, but there must be a couple. Greece 2004 maybe, maybe Denmark 1992. There must be prior cases. What makes Cristiano Ronaldo's UEFA Champions League run historical in nature the combination of his individual metrics as measured by Sofascore algorithms, or the media ratings of your choosing, alongside the odds-defying team success, even if we assume them to be the heavy favourites after-the-fact. For a team to have probabilistic outcome of 8% or lower (the odds he received for his Euro 2016), for the end result of five trophies out of ten attempts, each attempt needs to assume a success rate of 27% or higher, roughly speaking. I think given the years Barcelona was dominant in between 2008 and 2018, it would be very difficult to argue that Cristiano Ronaldo had the average odds of 27% or higher, across those years. Some years might be closer to 10%, other years closer to 30%, but very difficult to imagine the odds being close to 30% every single season. So not only is his UEFA Champions League success probabilistically just as impressive, if not more so, he actually combined it with very spectacular individual metrics on top of that. And even if competent teammates, lucky referee calls and great managers are vital parts of that chain of necessary assumptions for the final result, those things alone is not enough. Such miracles require more chains of events to go the right way. There probably needs to be like ten unbroken chain of miraculous events. Cristiano Ronaldo ensured his part of the chain never broke. Other players may have cycled in and out of form. Sometimes Marcelo. Sometimes Bale. Others had the luxury of swinging in and out of form. The moment Cristiano Ronaldo does the same (merely be world-class and choose the seasons to be extra great in), the chain breaks. The tournament top-scorer for consecutive events, the clutch moments in the knock-out stages, these needed to be a constant, for the team to have such ridiculous levels of sustained success with very low probabilistic odds. That is a very hard thing to assume, even for a great world-class attacker. Just ask the likes of Harry Kane, if he lives up to the occasion every single time, across multiple seasons, and ask him if that is so much easier than scoring a lot for a bad team, and dominating the GC% statistics. That is what happened with most other legends and world class attackers. And it coincides with their probabilistic outcome. It is not that Cristiano Ronaldo did everything, it is that he was not allowed to drop in level at all, non-stop for years on end, regardless of the difficulty of opponent. That unbroken part of the chain, cannot be repeated by mere world-class strikers, with higher degrees of certainty, for me. The margins of error are so ridiculously low for this level of achievement, I have no idea how Cristiano being mediocre in the World Cup is interpreted as an open invitation for any attacker to repeat the same thing, as long as they have shown the capacity to do it once, or in the case of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, within the happy imagination land of the true football auteurs. As for the added point of Cristiano Ronaldo not being able to perform in weaker teams, I would suspect given his threat during transitional phases, a weaker team that concedes control would suit him just fine. Jamie Vardy made a living out of it. I'm sure peak Cristiano Ronaldo would manage. I think the national team debate may have further explanations than just adjustments for team strength. I truly don't think placing Cristiano Ronaldo in a club equivalent of the Portuguese national team would be the death sentence that some here wish it would be at the club level. This is a very nuanced and difficult to solve quandary for me, due to the lack of data-sets, and the extra variables to consider, but some people just blaze past the difficulty, and go straight for the narrative option.
You’re arguing against a position I don’t hold. I’m not claiming Euro 2016 alone qualifies him as an all-time great- I’m arguing his cumulative transformation of Portuguese football does. Your probabilistic analysis actually supports my point. You note Portugal had 8% odds in 2016. But that’s precisely the issue: before Ronaldo’s era, Portugal wasn’t even consistently reaching major tournaments as a threat (or even reaching them at all). The 8% itself represents an elevation from where they historically sat. Consider the trajectory: Portugal pre-Ronaldo had zero major trophies across their entire footballing history. Under his captaincy spanning nearly two decades, they won Euro 2016, the Nations League 2019 and 2025 and became perennial semifinal-or-better contenders. He’s their all-time leading scorer by a massive margin and transformed their footballing identity from “talented underachievers” to “expect to compete for trophies.” Your Champions League analysis about needing sustained ~27% win probability actually strengthens the national team argument. At club level, Ronaldo could be placed on already-elite squads (Real Madrid, Manchester United). With Portugal, he elevated a tier-2 nation’s baseline probability itself to become a powerhouse. That’s objectively difficult, not easy. Greece 2004 and Denmark 1992 won once and receded. Portugal’s sustained competitiveness under Ronaldo is the distinction. Portugal is not in the category of one offs like Greece or Denmark - if anything the Netherlands is closer from Euro perspective as Portugal has reached two finals. And while the Nations League is not the Euro or World Cup, it is still competitively disputed - there’s a reason France, Portugal and Spain are the three only champions so far - arguably the three best countries in the era since the tournament’s inauguration.
That is impossible to numerically evaluate, as far as I'm concerned. Like let's imagine how the bookies would make the odds for Portugal before they qualified for the World Cup, in a hypothetical world without Cristiano Ronaldo, then calculate the odds of such a team reaching the round of 16 or higher, four times out of five (like Cristiano Ronaldo actually did). The problem is I cannot find any reference points, for the mentioned hypothetical team and conditions, so it becomes a total guessing game. If you throw a number. We can calculate the odds for it happening four times out of five. But the thing is, the odds per event is impossible to calculate. What if I want to use the odds for Portugal 2002 reaching the round of 16 as my basis, as opposed to your throw-away percentage? What if I want to use round of 16 odds for Portugal after Cristiano Ronaldo retires? And there has been players who perhaps did low probability miracle jobs during the qualifications stages, only to disappoint in the actual World Cup. Olisadebe for Poland in 2002, might be one example. There are just too many assumptions, and the comparisons become too reliant on what we believe to be true. If this feels real to you, so be it, but there is realistically no way of convincing me of this assertion in a logical manner. It is not about whether Cristiano Ronaldo helped the Portuguese scene or not, but whether he actually performed like a footballer worthy of the title of the best player (at least for that competition), and whether the probablistic odds of the associated team success was notable enough. Both things are applicable to his UEFA Champions League run. For his national team performances, not so much.
Yes, the way you are looking at it is “impossible” but the way you are looking at it is itself the issue and not the correct approach. You’re saying “It’s impossible to compare Portugal with Ronaldo odds with a hypothetical Portugal without Ronaldo odds.” Instead, you compare Portugal with Ronaldo odds, against reality’s Portugal without Ronaldo odds, that existed before he was in the team. Might be harder to find but it’s clean and real. But more importantly: you’d also have to account for the tournaments Portugal didn’t even qualify for before Ronaldo, which hasn’t happened once with him in the squad. That’s a quantifiable baseline shift from “sometimes fails to qualify” to “guaranteed participant and consistent contender.” Combined with the delta from zero major trophies to three, the transformation is numerically measurable. As mentioned, Portugal was always seen as occasionally very talented but they also were not consistently qualifying for tournaments. That needs to be accounted for too.
And that inevitably leads you to the conclusion that a player’s success depends on how good the team he plays for is. If Cristiano hadn’t played for Real Madrid he wouldn’t have won as much, so how do you know that there aren’t many more players who are just as good or close to that level, who simply didn’t have the opportunity to occupy that specific place at that specific moment?
Because he occupied it for a REASON. Florentino Perez did not pull a piece of paper out of a raffle with Ronaldo’s name on it and decide he was the lucky chosen one. It was a specific plan and it was decided he was the best player to build around - and he was rewarded for that decision. The selection itself is a measure and signal of quality. You keep bringing up Benzema’s 15 goal season as evidence that he can do what Ronaldo can do but seem completely unable to grasp with the fact that what Benzema did in one season, Ronaldo did in 4. That’s magnitudes different in terms of difficulty. Think of it like this: Perez was essentially given the choice between Benzema and Ronaldo in his prime and he did the math and likely concluded, the former could me a Champions League, but the latter could get me 4. It’s really not that difficult to understand these decisions. It was Ronaldo chosen and not anyone else for very specific, well-thought out reasons. You seem wholly unable to understand this. It’s actually quite remarkable. The issue with your way of thinking is not only that it’s inherently reductive but applying your logic, no player could be tied to the idea of greatness because if any of them achieve anything great you come back with “someone else, could like, totally have potentially done it. Maybe. Idk. But also, definitely” It’s literally asinine and leaves you where you started - unable to prove the thing you are trying to argue. A literal road to nowhere where you can’t be disproven while also not being able to prove anything yourself.
@Trachta10 For decades, hundreds if not thousands of world-class players played for massive clubs but only two players - Ronaldo and Messi - consistently reached the 50-goal-per-season threshold. To think you could just slot in another player and everything would be the same isn’t just literal nonsense - it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. A theoretical possibility supported by no data or piece of reality, at all.
Interesting study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5988281/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Within this study we made use of betting odds as a highly valuable tool in processing available information and forecasting sports events. The betting odds themselves are a measure for the expected success in the following match. Using our approach, we can directly map these expectations of the market to a quantitative rating of each team, i.e. a measure of team quality. This measure proves to be superior to results or goals when used within a framework of an ELO forecasting model. We did not evaluate the differences between ELO-Odds and the betting odds themselves in detail. Future studies investigating match related aspects (such as motivational aspects, line-up, etc.) might help to find and gain insights into factors that influence the betting odds of a match, but are not related to the general team quality. In contrast to prior research, we emphasized that rating methods and forecasting models can help to gain insights to the underlying processes in sports and that there is a strong link between forecasts and performance analysis... Due to the lack of an alternative, sport-scientific studies regularly use wins/losses, the number of goals or league table positions as a measure to differentiate between stronger and weaker soccer teams. With respect to the methods and results shown within this study, a measure based on betting odds would be more suitable than the aforementioned measures based on results, goals or league tables. "
You're only looking to one side of the coin. Yes he wouldn't have won that many CLs playing for Eibar. The other side is as I said he were a ceiling raiser. Real Madrid would still be strong without him but wouldn't win that many CLs without him also. They would lose those games who were decided by thin margins. For example, that game vs Wolfsburg in 15/16 which Ronaldo put the ball below his arms and decided the game. I can say the same about the Juventus game on 17/18 QF. Not counting the 16/17 that he decided every single game from QF to final against the best defenses of this century. The mere presence of Ronaldo on the pitch dictated how his opponents' defenses played. Part of why Real Madrid started to struggle on CL KOs after Ronaldo departure were because teams didn't fear Real Madrid anymore as it lost their strongest player. It's like removing the fangs of a lion. He still is a lion but without his fangs he looks harmless. Fang is the lion's ceiling raiser. Similarly, it's pointless to put a lion's fangs on a pinscher. It won't become the king of the jungle because of the fangs, but obviously it will be more dangerous than a pinscher without them. I already explained here what a superteam without Ronaldo looks like. ManCity, Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern, etc... Peak Ronaldo would raise their ceiling from very strong and competitive teams into dynasties
You’re wrong. The fact that Cristiano and Messi reached such goal totals is because they occupied a very specific moment in football history. Don’t you see that the fact that players coincidentally have so many goals in that period should make you suspect that what’s changing is the context? The problem is that you (and most people) don’t have a proper notion of how football has changed from era to era, If you looked at it from a broader perspective, you would think differently.
So, every stat is a lie without proper context. When someone says, "this player has this many goals" or "this player has this many titles" it’s almost entirely relative.
Their achievements are anomalous achievements. You are arguing what? That more goals have been scored in the modern era? Ok, then that would mean more goals for Ronaldo and Messi - but that would mean more goals for everyone else too. So your model doesn’t account for the fact that Ronaldo and Messi still ACHIEVED more than anyone else that have basically played the game. They were the premium above the baseline that you still haven’t modeled. You think you look relatively because you look across eras but the real relativity is in what they achieved.
Tomáš Skuhravý He had a style quite similar to Ibra on my view like those attackers who don't help defensively. although Tomas tackled more better than Ibra but always dangerous because they always attack the final third and because they park the bus in the final third They move between the final defensive lines. Then they become dangerous, yes. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomáš_Skuhravý
It is possible, bearing in mind everything I said before. The 1-10 rating scale is mathematically awkward, and there are some more accurate, but "uglier" alternatives, that I think will be the future of football if no already behind the scenes (probably are). However, here is a simplistic model that accounts for team strength that can actually be calculated immediately: Sofascore rating of a player - sofascore rating of a team = delta performance For example: 9,0 - 7,3 = +1,7 Or 6,2 - 7,3 = -1,1 Then you basically consider performance through that delta. The highest delta is the best performance. This accounts for team strength, crudely but it does. Essentially, this delta-like performance evaluation is the alternative to the rating scale that solves the problem of team stremgth in principle and other problems with the 1-10 rating scale. Team rating here, in effect, works as an expected baseline of performance and a player is evaluated based on it. I am not sure how sofascore generates team rating. Is it sum or weighted sum of average individual ratings or some other means. This can be expanded further based on a model. It is possible to calculate individual rating of a player based on independent metrics and team rating based on its own independent metrics (rather than sum of averages), then in the same way used to calculate delta. A lot can be done right now with informations that are available. Of course, it presupposes validity of sofascore rating as such, which is not perfect, but in future, these independent evaluations can be improved, then the whole thing becomes more accurate. Ultimately, for mathemstically sound models that account for team circumstances, it will be inevitable to reconceptualize the 1-10 rating scale as the "delta" rating scale. The delta rating is actually how we judge players in our heads in the first place when we watch them play (always judging them based on internal references or expectations), and this is capturable by mathematical models. There are many possibilities. The bottleneck atm is actually real-time performance tracking. With advances in this domain, coming up with sophisticated models is less of a challenge.
The only main difference between Tomas and Ibra was that Ibra had more skill and a wider repertoire of dribbling techniques.
SofaScore Ratings DataBase in general . ! has more mistakes than all the wrong things " bad stuff " in the entire world. !
Sofascore rating of a player - sofascore rating of a team = delta performance For example: 9,0 - 7,3 = +1,7 Or 6,2 - 7,3 = -1,1 type Johan Cruyff vs Sweden in World Cup 1974 .. the whole team hindering the player The opposite of this Henry hindering the entire French team in the Euro Cup in 2004 overall performances