Ronaldo wins the battle, but Messi winning the war

There is no doubt in my mind that Cristiano Ronaldo was a deserving winner of this year’s Ballon D’Or, an award given annually to the most outstanding individual footballer from the past calendar year. Ronaldo’s victory marks an end to Messi’s three year stranglehold on the award. Despite this, I have a hard time agreeing with those who argue that Ronaldo is the better player.

Let me start by saying that this is not a balanced article which will evaluate the merits of each player with equal weight. I wholeheartedly believe that Messi is the better player, and there are no arguments on the matter that will change my mind. Not only is he a better player, but in the everlasting conflict between good and evil, Messi represents all that is good about football, and Ronaldo is his adversary, the Cain to Messi’s Abel, if you will. So why have I reached this profound conclusion? And how has it been affected in the context of Ronaldo’s recent Ballon D’Or victory?

Messi represents all that is good about football, and Ronaldo is his adversary

Anybody who has any interest in the Ballon D’Or award will be well aware of the all-important stats from the 2013 calendar year. I present exhibit A, Cristiano Ronaldo: 56 goals in 46 games for Real Madrid and 10 goals in 10 games for Portugal. Averaging more than one goal a game is an extremely impressive achievement.

In fact this achievement slightly exceeded our second exhibit, Mr Messi, who scored 42 goals in 45 games for Barcelona. It is important to remember than Messi suffered a hamstring injury on April 2 2013 which kept him sidelined for much of the remainder of the season. We can only guess as to whether he would have matched Ronaldo’s goals to games ratio had he stayed fit.

However, whilst these statistics undoubtedly distance Messi and Ronaldo from the rest of the elite attacking players in Europe (no other player reached the coveted one-goal-a-game mark in 2013), they neglect what is justifiably the most important stat of all: winning. Enter exhibit C, Franck Ribery. I hate to use the awful American expression ‘winningest’, but Ribery literally could not have won any more trophies than he did in 2013. Ribery’s Bayern Munich claimed the Bundesliga, German Cup, Champions League, European Super Cup and Club World Cup in what is, quite comfortably, the greatest season by a European club in my lifetime.

Ronaldo, Messi and Ribery announce their forthcoming super-group boyband tour.

However, the Achilles’ Heel in Ribery’s case is that Bayern are such a well balanced and dominant side that it is hard to identify one player as the best on the team. If anything, I believe that Bastian Schweinsteiger, rather than Ribery is worthy of that title. Schweinsteiger has supplanted Andres Iniesta and Xavi as the premier central midfielder in Europe, and has continued his form into 2014, currently completing a ridiculous 92% of his passes. He is one of the key reasons why I believe Germany will win the World Cup this summer.

However, back to the Ballon D’Or, of which Ribery himself has been highly critical of in the past week. “I won everything, with the team and individually. Ronaldo won nothing”, the French international said in an interview with Munich’s TZ newspaper. He went on to suggest that FIFA had deliberately extended the voting deadline from November 15 to November 29, 2013, in order to ‘take into account recent performances’, namely Ronaldo’s sensational hat-trick against Sweden in the World Cup Qualifier.

This leads us on to our final point of debate, and the winning trump card for all Ronaldo-lovers: international performance. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have heard Messi be derided for disappearing on the international stage. This argument has no basis in fact. Lets return to our beloved goals-to-games ratio statistic. Ronaldo has scored 47 goals in 106 games for Portugal, finding the net 0.44 times per game. Similarly, Messi has scored 37 in 83 games for Argentina, with an almost identical strike rate of 0.45.

I believe that Bastian Schweinsteiger, rather than Ribery, is worthy of the title of best player on the Bayern Munich team

Meanwhile, if we revert to our ‘wins are all that matters’ criteria, both players are frankly disappointing, but Messi has actually won an international competition with Argentina, which Ronaldo has failed to do. Albeit, it was the Olympic Tournament, often viewed as somewhat of a ‘mickey mouse’ tournament, but the best Ronaldo has managed is second place in the 2004 Euros, in which his Portugal fell to the mighty Greece.

However you interpret these arguments, the World Cup this summer certainly sets the stage for an enticing showdown between Messi and Ronaldo. This may help us definitively decide who the best footballer of our generation is.