Ajoje⚽⚖️@israel_ajoje
Messi v Ronaldo: With Bias, You Will Always Find the Narrative You Are Looking For
With bias, you will always find the narrative you are looking for. Nowhere is this truer than in football, and nowhere in football is it more visible than in the GOAT debate. The conversation is inherently subjective.
There is no universal scorecard. And because there is no universal scorecard, bias fills the gap, and people argue across decades, across continents, across generations, and never quite arrive anywhere.
Please just stay with me. You will see my what I am driving at if you do. I assure you.
Before Messi and Ronaldo consumed the debate entirely, there were two names that occupied that space. Pelé and Maradona. So dominant was their standing that FIFA conducted two separate polls in the year 2000 to determine the Player of the Century.
Maradona won the public internet vote with 53.6%. Pelé won the expert panel, composed of journalists, coaches, and officials, with 72.75%. FIFA, diplomatically, named them joint winners. Based on the foregoing, he debate was officially sanctioned as unresolvable.
But here is what makes that remarkable. Look at the era Maradona actually played in.
Michel Platini for example won three consecutive Ballon d'Ors between 1983 and 1985, a feat that had never been achieved before and has only been surpassed once since.
He scored nine goals at a single European Championship, a record that still stands more than forty years later. He won the Serie A title, the European Cup, and a European Championship with France, all while being the best player in the world for three straight years.
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge won back-to-back Ballon d'Ors in 1980 and 1981, reached consecutive World Cup finals, and was widely regarded as one of the most complete strikers the sport had produced.
Marco Van Basten won three Ballon d'Ors, led the Netherlands to the 1988 European Championship with one of the most technically perfect volleys ever struck, and was so far ahead of his time that multiple coaches called him the greatest they had ever worked with.
Lothar Matthäus, whom Maradona himself named as his greatest rival, won the 1990 World Cup and the Ballon d'Or in the same year, with 150 international appearances that remain the German record to this day.
So on paper, the 1980s was overflowing with players who matched or exceeded Maradona by almost every formal measure available.
Platini had more Ballon d'Ors. Van Basten had comparable individual awards and a Champions League.
Rummenigge had consecutive golden balls and World Cup final appearances. The likes of ROmario and Gerd Muller(of dufferent generations of course even had more goals tha he did).
And Maradona, remember, never won a conventional Ballon d'Or at all, because the award excluded South Americans throughout his entire peak.
And yet none of them are in the conversation the way Maradona is. Not even close.
Because in 1986, Maradona did something that no trophy, no award, and no statistical record has ever been able to replicate or contain. He carried a nation of forty million people to a World Cup on his back.
He scored the Hand of God and then, four minutes later in the same match, the Goal of the Century against England and at a World Cup quarter-final.
Yet the hand of God wasn't a taint on his legacy or his stake to the claim of being GOAT. The weight of that moment, and what people felt when they watched it, permanently overrode every comparison that statistics could ever produce.
That is the thing about legacy. It does not care about your trophy count, individual awards, or goals. Yes all of these contribute to what one's legacy eventually becomes. But they are not the main thing.
Let us consider something closer to our present. Henry, Ibrahimovic, Benzema, Lewandowski, and Suarez represent one of the most decorated generations of strikers the sport has ever produced.
Between them, only one won the Ballon d'Or. Only one won the World Cup. Does that make either of those individuals definitively greater than the other four? Just think about it.
Modric, Pirlo, Kroos, Iniesta, Busquets, Scholes, Gerrard, Lampard and Xavi form a midfield generation that may never be replicated. Between all of them, only one Ballon d'Ors.
Does that mean the one who won it was undisputably superior to the rest, or does it mean the award simply could not accommodate the scale of that generation?
You may not agree yet. But I think this will drive it home for yous. Dembele. He has a Ballon d'Or and 2 Champions League titles. Mbappe, widely regarded as one of the two or three best players alive today, has neither at club level.
So on paper, in this single snapshot of time, Dembélé outranks Mbappe. You can ask anyone who watches football regularly whether they actually believe that, and watch what happens.
Now let's bring that exact same reasoning forward to the crux of the conversation. Messi has 900+ goals, eight Ballon d'Ors, more than any player in history. He has a World Cup, a Copa America, four Champions League titles, and forty-three major trophies, the most any footballer has ever accumulated.
Ronaldo has 950+ career goals, the highest verified total in football history. He has five Ballon d'Ors, a European Championship, five Champions League titles, and so on.
By the numbers, Messi leads the argument in almost every category. And yet millions of people around the world, right now, would fight you over that conclusion.
Not because the data is wrong, but because Ronaldo made them feel something the data was never designed to measure. He made people believe that wanting something badly enough, working for it hard enough, refusing to accept its absence long enough, could actually get you there. That feeling does not live in a spreadsheet.
Here is what Pelé and Maradona already showed us, and what we are watching unfold again right in front of us. Trophies tell you who won. Legacy tells you who mattered.
And the saddest and most beautiful thing about this debate is that by the time it is finally settled, the two men at the centre of it will be long retired, and the people who watched them will still be arguing.
Not because they cannot see the evidence, but because the evidence never quite captures what they actually witnessed.
That is not a flaw in the debate. That is the whole point of it.
I say this because people are saying now that Ronaldo doesnt deserve to be in the GOAT debate with Messi. Well, I am a Ronaldo truther. And I believe Messi is greater. But from the above, you'll be very dishonest to tell me you don't see how that can be subjective.
Please, with civility, let me know what you think in the comments section.
My name is Ajoje. I am a FIFA Licensed Agent and International Sports Lawyer. I write on the Law and Business of Football, a lot. Repost and Follow if you want to read more posts like this.
