By ESPN
Cristiano Ronaldo has been a prolific scorer and dominant force in England, Spain and Italy during his illustrious career. But how has his playing style altered as he has achieved success with Manchester United, Real Madrid and Juventus? Gab Marcotti dug into the data.
The early years (2002-06)
Cristiano Ronaldo made his professional debut for Sporting at 17 years of age, coming on at half-time of a home defeat to Partizan in the UEFA Cup. You could tell he was not fully developed physically; he was tall and thin with a shirt billowing, and not just because that was the style at the time.
Sporting knew they had something special on their hands, but as often happens with young players, there was a fear of mental burnout. Plus, perhaps, a lack of clarity on how to best use him.
The focus was on Ronaldo’s most obvious skills: speed in open spaces, long limbs pumping and an ability to beat opponents one-on-one. The rest was all to be discovered; he had played more centrally at times at youth level, but was used almost exclusively wide in the first team, as often happens with players breaking through.
Give him space. Let him breathe. Let him find who he is.
Most know the story about how Sir Alex Ferguson became determined to sign Ronaldo after he starred in an August 2003 preseason friendly between Manchester United and Sporting, but United had been tracking him for some time, and as best we can tell, that game didn’t persuade Ferguson to sign the 18-year-old as much as it persuaded him to take Ronaldo to Old Trafford straightaway rather than leave him for a season on loan at Sporting.
United got his signature ahead of several other European clubs who had been hot on his tail, including Arsenal, Valencia, Barcelona — yes, there’s a parallel universe in which Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are teammates and monopolise the sport for 15 years — and Parma, who had a verbal agreement with Sporting.
The Ronaldo who arrived in England — and inherited United’s No. 7 shirt from Real Madrid-bound David Beckham — was a close relative of the Sporting version. He was a piece of clay, yet to be molded but hungry to experiment. He was encouraged to express himself, and that usually meant one thing: dribbling and beating opponents.
His mazy runs usually started wide and took him all over the pitch, but his head was often down, and this meant he would miss the runs of teammates or fail to spot the moment to shoot. In fact, Guillem Balague notes in his biography of Ronaldo that when he was playing as a traditional winger, other United players were sometimes left frustrated: “Why doesn’t he just bollock it!?!” Gary Neville used to think each time he would see Ronaldo take an extra touch and pass up the opportunity to shoot.
Centre-forward Ruud van Nistelrooy was among the most irritated, running into space for through balls that never arrived and losing defenders for crosses that never came. Going from Beckham to that version of Ronaldo was not easy when you were a supply-dependent striker.
Ronaldo’s Premier League statistics from that period are limited to goals and assists, but they corroborate the idea that he was a work in progress. H e averaged 0.2 assists and 0.26 non-penalty goals, which are not bad numbers for his age, but they did not offer many clues to what would happen in the next stage of his development.
We do have more detailed statistics — albeit with a smaller sample size — for his performance at Euro 2004, where he was a 19-year-old who parachuted into the final years of Portugal‘s Golden Generation. Ronaldo attempted more dribbles (7.79) than anybody else at the tournament and ranked among the leaders in shots on goal with 4.1.
Tellingly, and unlike most of his later career, he was also among the tournament leaders in possession-adjusted tackles and interceptions (3.29). Being on the big stage, with the pressure of playing for a host nation, perhaps gave him more freedom than he found at United, where he joined a veteran side coming off years of success.
Taking over (2006-09)
In the summer of 2006, United made what would turn out to be a fateful decision, selling Van Nistelrooy to Real Madrid and clearing the way for the further development not just of Ronaldo but also of Wayne Rooney, another young attacker born in 1985.
Van Nistelrooy, who had just turned 30, had notched 150 goals in all competitions during five seasons, but rather than replacing him directly, Ferguson went into the 2006-07 season with an attacking corps, the members of which all had questions to answer.
There was Rooney and Ronaldo, respectively just 20 and 21, plus 33-year-old Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who had not started a league game for two years, and Louis Saha, no stranger to the treatment table himself and scorer of just 24 goals in two and a half years at the club. Alan Smith was also there, but had suffered a bad injury the previous February and was not exactly a scoring machine, as evidenced by one goal in his previous 33 outings.
United had failed to win the league in each of the three previous seasons — the club’s longest drought in 15 years — and had finished an average of 14 points outside first place in that time. Their only new signing ahead of the 2006-07 campaign was Michael Carrick, a deep-lying midfielder; essentially, Ferguson was handing the keys of the team to Ronaldo and Rooney.
Ronaldo became the focal point of the attack, or, rather, because Rooney was also an unorthodox striker rather than a traditional centre-forward, the pair were the hub of a fluid offense, each reacting to the other’s movement. Ronaldo began to exploit his aerial ability, scoring eight league goals over three seasons with his head and vastly outperforming expected goals — xG — which amounted to 3.03 in that time.
He usually lined up on the right, but occasionally played through the middle or on the left, but in some ways where he started mattered less than where he ended up: all over the pitch, creating mismatches and wreaking havoc. As he took on more attacking responsibility, he started taking more shots and averaged more than five a game, a figure he would stay above through the rest of his United career.
Not only that but, to use Neville’s term, he started “bollocking it” from distance. Of the 527 shots Ronaldo took in those three seasons, nearly 60% came from more than 21 yards out. That would remain a hallmark throughout his career, although his effectiveness from distance has waned over time. So too has his dead-ball prowess; in this period, he scored nine free kick goals in the league.
To accommodate Ronaldo’s freedom, Ferguson added attacking players in 2007 (Carlos Tevez) and 2008 (Dimitar Berbatov). While both helped share the load, crucially neither was a traditional centre-forward who might clog the middle or get in Ronaldo’s way. Tevez, a bit like the Rooney of the time, was a hardworking, unselfish force of nature, and Berbatov, while offering less in terms of work rate, liked to find space deeper and often prioritized finding teammates over scoring himself.
United won three consecutive league titles and, just as important, excelled in the Champions League, reaching a semifinal and two finals (winning it all in 2007-08). Over the past 50 years, the club have reached the final four of the Champions League or European Cup on only five occasions: three of them came in this period, with Ronaldo running rampant.
While this piece is mostly about his individual statistics and how he has changed and evolved, you cannot forget that football is a team game. And it is not a coincidence that his last three years at United, when he was tasked with carrying the team, coincided with arguably the best three-year period in club history.
Peak Cristiano (2009-14)
But for Ferguson’s veto and a gentleman’s agreement, Ronaldo would have moved to Real Madrid in the summer of 2008. Instead, he made the switch a year later as part of perhaps the biggest (and most expensive) overhaul in history. In addition to his world-record fee of €94 million ($102m at the time), Kaka, Karim Benzema, Xabi Alonso and Raul Albiol also moved to the Bernabeu as part of a quarter-billion-Euro spending spree for new manager Manuel Pellegrini.
Florentino Perez’s return as president heralded a new “Galactico Era,” following that of Zinedine Zidane, Luis Figo and the original Ronaldo, but the learning curve was steep. Cramming so many stars, plus a number of illustrious holdovers, into a coherent XI was not easy for Pellegrini, and the task was made harder by the fact they were up against Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona.
Real Madrid finished second in 2009-10 but were a disjointed side that crashed out of the Champions League at the round-of-16 stage. That they ranked last in La Liga for shot quality, with an xG/shot of 0.06, tells you this was more a bunch of individuals than a team.
Ronaldo took responsibility, as he had done at United. He led the team in shots and dribbles attempted, and his time was divided quite equally along the attacking front: left, right and centre. He finished the campaign with 33 goals; 26 of them were scored in La Liga, which saw him one behind Gonzalo Higuain.
Things changed when Jose Mourinho replaced Pellegrini. The relationship between the Portuguese pair would go through highs and lows, but the “Special One” quickly found Ronaldo a clear position as a left-sided wide forward, with plenty of licence to come inside. He still took plenty of shots (averaging 6.91 over Mourinho’s three seasons), but took them from better positions (his xG/shot doubled to 0.12).
Mourinho’s approach was less possession-based than that of Pellegrini, and Ronaldo thrived with greater reliance on quick transitions and playing into space, while quickly adapting to Higuain and Benzema, who alternated at centre-forward.
Higuain was more of a penalty-area striker, but had the technique and vision to set up wingers and midfielders for shots. Benzema, a bit like Tevez and Rooney at United, covered huge areas of the attacking front, running tirelessly and allowing Ronaldo to pick his spots. The two would form a devastating tandem for most of the next decade.
