One is a pure athlete. The epitome of what hard-work achieves; pushing the body to boundaries it has not before experienced – an utter machine. The other, an absolute natural talent with magnets as feet to which the ball is attracted. A beautiful spectacle to watch.
Ronaldo has previously titled the players’ relationship as “professional,” in an interview with beIN sport, despite the best efforts of the media to fabricate something other than an amicable rapport between the two.
Regardless of their placid relationship, the comparisons and appraisals of who is the better player continue to divide opinion. I am not here to offer another archived opinion, but instead to tell you who is worth more.
Forget commercial worth, or how many Mars bars they could buy with the amount they earn a week – this is how much hard, thumb-licking cash they are worth on the transfer market.
Ronaldo seems to elevate his value as each season progresses, whilst Messi has in many instances been donned “priceless”. To discover the transfer value of the two players, I turned to the superb site of the CIES Football Observatory.
The website is the Mecca of in-depth football statistics. A certain section, named the ‘Transfer Value Calculator’ (TVC), is the one to which the findings are sourced. The process of discovering a player’s value entails detailing the amount of league games the player has played in four different stages over the last two years, along with the amount of league goals they have scored in those respective periods.
Whilst also taking into account age, expiration of contract, position, domestic league, national team, national team appearances and the points per game their club team earned in the four stages in the last two years, the TVC somehow produces an estimated price of the player. Don’t ask me how.
Taking a good thirty minutes to complete the fastidious calculations of each player, I excitedly anticipated my email from CIES, telling me the value of each player. Here are the results.
Cristiano Ronaldo: £99m-115m
Lionel Messi: £147m-£171m
To be honest, it’s a bit of a landslide. Taking the midpoint of the bookend evaluations, Ronaldo is worth £107m and Messi is worth £159m. The points per game of Barcelona in the given periods did better that of Real Madrid, whilst Ronaldo being two years Messi’s senior must have played an important factor. Although the biggest swinging factor was the form of Messi at the beginning of the 2012/2013 season, which saw him net 42 times in 23 appearances in La Liga.
Since his £80 million departure from Manchester United in 2009, it appears Ronaldo has increased his worth by just fewer than 34%, a feat not to be overlooked. Given Messi’s devoutness to Barcelona, his increase in price cannot be denoted by a number. Maybe, he is in fact, priceless.
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Source: DSG
