wangus12 said:
aTmAg said:
Louis botha said:
Ronaldo has more hardware and performs when it counts lol you Messi fan boys .
Such as when Portugal won the 2016 Euro final while Ronaldo cried on the sidelines? Portugal is good without Ronaldo. Argentina is crap without Messi. Messi has been carrying them for about a decade.
You can tell who is better by the fact that when people talk about Ronaldo, they compare him to Messi. When they talk about Messi they compare him to Maradona, Pele, Cruyff, etc. Hell even Ronaldo himself banned the word "Messi" from his household and is fixated on chasing Messi's legacy.
People compare Messi to Ronaldo and vice versa all the time. They both get compared to the legends from 30-50 years ago. And Portugal aren't very good without Ronaldo. He scored/assisted 6 of their 9 goals in the Euros. France were all over them in the finals until ET when they scored on a counter. Not to mention they almost always have to qualify via the UEFA playoffs because they never win their group (except for 2018).
Both of them are on the same tier of greatness and in my opinion Messi edges Ronaldo out, but lets not act like there is some massive discrepancy between them.
I cannot think of a time where I have seen Ronaldo alone compared to the greats of all time. Yet I have seen that of Messi plenty of times. Whenever I see Ronaldo compared to historical greats it's usually with Messi (such as "how lucky we are to have Messi and Ronaldo playing in the same generation")
Without Messi, Argentina lost to Spain 1-6 and would have never qualified for the WC. With Messi, they not only qualify (thanks to Messi singlehandedly), they get past the group stage and lose to the eventual WC winner by 1 point. And, BTW, the French's coach said in an interview afterwards that a central part of his strategy was in having 2 guys mark Messi and also keeping Messi's teammates from passing him the ball in the first place. One would hope that the rest of Argentina would be able capitalize when the opponent spends so much energy stopping one player, but alas the rest of the team always seems to suck for the NT (as 1-6 would indicate). I think that if Messi played for Spain or Portugal (without Ronaldo) he'd have multiple WCs trophies by now.
Regarding the discrepancy it depends on what factors you consider important. If it's all about scoring goals, then they are pretty even. But if it's about overall play making ability, giving the team chances, etc. I think the discrepancy is quite a bit larger. Don't get me wrong, I think the discrepancy between Messi and Ronaldo is less than Ronaldo and #3 (and I'm not even sure who I'd say that is), but I think that he has a level of "savantness" that Ronaldo could never hope to reach, no matter how hard he works (and he works his ass off).