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We watch sports for our entertainment and what makes sports juicy for us are the legendary rivalries. We get a sense of thrill when we see titans colliding on the big stages for the grandest of prizes.
The world saw James Hunt and Niki Lauda colliding in the racing arena, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal having legendary matches at Rolland Garros and Wimbledon; Lee Chong Wei and Lin Dan having iconic badminton clashes and similarly in the world of football Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have enthralled the world for the past decade or so.
Playing characteristics defining their greatness
Cristiano Ronaldo is an incredible machine, one of the most dedicated professionals in sporting history, whose work ethic is unparalleled and one who will put in whatever amount of work required both physically and mentally to achieve one's goals.
He will quite easily go down as the greatest athlete to grace a football pitch.
Messi, on the other hand, is just a genius who quite possibly is the most technically gifted player of all time. A player who has a vision on the football pitch like nobody in history has ever had, Messi has the capability of turning a match on its head as he is capable of running through whole teams on his own and scoring incredible goals.
Humble beginnings
Coming from an island in Portugal, hard work was the key to success for Cristiano Ronaldo as he had to work his way up through various sporting academies, had to overcome a racing heart problem when he was 15 and became the first player to go from the U-16 to the first-team level in a year at Sporting Lisbon.
Messi had very similar beginnings, getting rejected by various clubs such as River Plate, Newell's Old Boys in Argentina in spite of his precious talent due to Growth Hormone Deficiency which required almost $1000 a month for treatment. Tales of him scoring hundreds of goals at youth stages are known far and wide.
Early Successes
Luck changed for them very quickly as Manchester United bought Ronaldo in 2003 and Barcelona accepted to pay for Messi's treatment in 2000.
Ronaldo replaced David Beckham as the new number 7 of Manchester United and went on to become one of the greatest players to don a Man United kit during his 6-year stint at the club.
He had a very successful stint in Manchester where he won 3 premier league titles along with a champions league in the 2007-08 season.
He won his first Ballon d'Or that season for scoring 40+goals.
The world first came to notice Messi's greatness when he slammed a hattrick against Real Madrid at the tender age of 19 in El Clasico. Pep Guardiola's Barcelona side which rewrote footballing history depended on Lionel Messi's genius.
He had won 3 Ballon d'ors by the age of 23.
In 2009, Real Madrid paid a world record £94 million to Manchester United for Cristiano Ronaldo which might have gone down as the cheapest 94 million pounds ever since by then everybody knew that Ronaldo was priceless and Madrid was getting him for a snippet. The world was about to witness two footballing monsters going head to head in the same league fighting for the same trophies and amaze fans for the next decade or so.
Main years of rivalry in La Liga
Cristiano Ronaldo would go down as the greatest forward in Madrid's history as he scored 40+ goals every year for the club excluding the first year. He had a goal to game ratio of more than 1 when most players struggle to achieve even half of that.
He even scored 60 goals for the club in the 2011-12 season when the club under Jose Mourinho built one of the most devastating counterattacking teams in modern football history scoring 121 goals in the league itself.
Messi would also go down as Barcelona's greatest player. His goals to game ratio might not be as good as Ronaldo's at Madrid but will remember him as a scorer of great goals like the ones against Getafe where he ran past a whole team, against Real Zaragoza, Athletic Bilbao, and many other unfortunate opponents.
He also broke the record for most number of goals scored in a year when he scored 91 goals in 2012 beating the record previously held by Gerd Muller.
Iconic individual performances
Ronaldo has been recently claimed to be a Champions League specialist winning it on four different occasions in the last five years with Madrid and his contributions in the latter stages of the tournament against the likes of Bayern Munich, Atletico Madrid and Juventus have been legendary. A 33-year-old man hitting a bicycle kick goal against a legendary Juventus defense proved the greatness of Cristiano Ronaldo to everybody.
After Guardiola left Barcelona, Messi has been the carrier of the team on and off the pitch, winning titles on his own and bringing success to the club. People claiming Ronaldo to be better can see the clip of Messi breaking the ankles of Jerome Boateng to score a wonder goal in the champions league semifinal.
Both have run away with almost all the individual awards in the past decade. Both have 5 Ballon d'Or each. Ronaldo has won a trophy on the international stage at the Euro 2016 which Messi has not done till date while Messi won 2 trebles with Barcelona which Ronaldo has not done till now.
One depends on power and athleticism while the other depends on elegance and technical brilliance: both are to be treasured when they are in their prime and playing for our joy.
