The decline of Ronaldo?

Cristiano Ronaldo had a standout year in terms of trophies but is he in decline? A new book by Duncan Alexander, known by his pseudonym @OptaJoe, examines the stats to get to the truth. The following is an extract from Opta Joe’s Football Yearbook 2016…

A reported 85,000 people crowded into the Bernabeu to see Ronaldo unveiled as a Real Madrid player in early July 2009. Madrid had made many forays to the Premier League in the 2000s to acquire players, from McManaman to Beckham, Woodgate to Gravesen, but this was a different level altogether, both financially and theatrically. Ronaldo’s sheer menace meant that great things were expected once he reached La Liga. He didn’t disappoint.

Ronaldo’s first four league games for Real saw him score once, once, twice and once respectively, leaving him with a goals to game rate of 1.25. It has barely dipped since.

As the table below shows, he played fewer than 3000 minutes of league and Champions League football in his first season in Spain, an ankle injury in the autumn leading to a rare spell in the treatment clinic for the usually perma-fit forward. Even so, Ronaldo still managed more than a goal per 90 and his rate of 7.49 shots per 90 is a career high (level with the 2012/13 season). Perhaps in an attempt to ingratiate himself with his new team-mates, Ronaldo’s chances created per 90 rate of 2.59 goals per game is the best he has ever registered in his career. The man who arrived at Real was a goalscorer, yes, but also a supplier.

The consistency Ronaldo showed in his first four seasons in Spain is remarkable. As the figures above clearly demonstrate, if you went to a game in this period you could roughly expect to see a Ronaldo goal and seven shots in your allotted 90 minutes of action. ‘Selfish Ronaldo’ still assists at a rate that all but a handful of players in world football would be delighted with. Between 2009 and 2015 he produced 65 assists, behind only Lionel Messi, Mesut Ozil and Cesc Fabregas in the top five European leagues.

It’s genuinely difficult to thread a way through the records Ronaldo set once he had his feet under the table at Real (so numerous they are), but his two Ballons d’Or at Madrid (in 2013 and 2014) are almost numerically equal to the number of league titles and Champions Leagues he has won in his entire time there (one league in 2012 and European titles in 2014 and 2016 respectively). Yes, he has had to play in a division against a Barcelona team experiencing their own holy peak but, even so, he won more leagues/Champions Leagues in his final three seasons at Manchester United as he has in seven seasons in Madrid. He was the cherry on the cake at Old Trafford but often at Real he has had to be the sponge as well, soaking up both opposition attention and the criticism of the famously intolerant fanbase.

However you look at it, his goalscoring has come at a rate that was once deemed the preserve of the 1920s and 1930s when balls were heavy and pressing was light. The similarly extravagant returns by Messi at Barcelona has created a rivalry that will live on for decades, and almost certainly pushed both men to greater heights. Twenty-six goals in 29 games in his first La Liga season was followed by 40 in 34 in 2010/11, the first time any player had hit that number in a single season. A year later Ronaldo pushed the mark to 46 and finally claimed the …

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