The once and future king.

[the4thjuliek]

Comments

[aquaecolore]

Haven't managed more than a skim yet but Mr Ronaldo and Mr Messi, i don't know why that sounds so foreign xD

[the4thjuliek]

Hehe, the Economist always does that.

[blackjedii]

they have been regarded by common consent as the two best players in the sport attacking players bc no comms GAF about keepers and/or defenders AMIRITE

or defensive mids

screw it all teh team will be strikers bc Messi and Ronaldo

[the4thjuliek]

Unfortunately :(

I do like this part though: "Half the game is defence, which is excluded entirely from this calculation. And even on offence, playmaking ability-consisting both of passing skill, and of the ability to draw defenders’ attention and open space for teammates-can matter as much or more as the final act of slipping the ball past the keeper."

[blackjedii]

That's good of them. I just get tired of the BEST PLAYERS BEST PLAYERS although I fully acknowledge that that's a media hype thing.

And of course La Liga is an eintirely different beast from say, EPL and Bundesliga. I'd almost like to see Messi and Ronaldo go to EPL for a stint to see whether they can still be ungodly good without their teammates behind them.

[marsyke]

Ronaldo already played in the EPL and in 07-08 he scored 31 goals, the highest tally in the past 15 seasons only Luis Suarez managed 31 goals too.
Henry, Van Persie and a certain Philips managed 30 in their best seasons.
Ronaldo has nothing to left to prove in England with 3 league titles, an FA Cup, 2 League Cup and a CL.

Messi would do well in other leagues too. But not so well as he did with Barcelona.

[marsyke]

I actually support Madrid but I went to a Barcelona match once. And the strangest thing was that although Messi scored a hattrick, Xavi stood out for me. That was quite strange. But Messi just walks around a bit and then suddenly he gets the ball, tries some magic. And then play continues and he's just walking around a bit again. With me starting work next year, I hope to visit the Bernabeu too some time and to compare them in real life.

Anyway comparisons in a way are subjective. I love Beethoven and my best friend prefers Brahms. Don't know if we really need to establish who is the best of best.
This is an interesing analysis. Although I have the feeling that the World Cup features quite heavily and that gives Messi a big advantage in these statistics because Ronaldo's World Cup wasn't all that.

The reason why Messi walks around

[jazzypom]

Especially in the first five minutes of matches is that he notes the opponents' positions, knows who is where, and then he keeps that in mind. When he sees the space, he exploits it, the game shifts, and then he notes the positions again. That's pretty chess and zen. There's an article that talks about it on ESPN. If I weren't on phone, I'd link it here.

RE: The reason why Messi walks around

[marsyke]

Yeah that sounds like a good explanation. It was quite a surprise for me because you don't really notice that when you watch on tv.

[the4thjuliek]

Apparently, Messi does the 'walking around, then breaking into a run' thing to conserve his energy. He's not a particularly muscular guy with a lot of power like Crispy and conserving energy helps him to run fast when he needs to.

If y'all are into more stats

[givemedaughters]

Here's an article from July 2014 that evaluates Messi's performance for both Barca and Argentina and concludes as follows: "if Barca-Messi and Argentina-Messi were two different people, even based solely on the stats recorded since 2010, there’s a good chance they’d be the two best players in the world"
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lionel-messi-is-impossible/

Americans are just nutty about sports analysis and statistics.

Re: If y'all are into more stats

[blackjedii]

we have to do something with the math that we never use anywhere else