The Timeless Rivalry: Ronaldo vs Messi

An investigation tracking Messi and Ronaldo’s performance trends

Graphical Geniuses:
Mobolaji, Narasimha, Pradnya, Praveen, Tushar, Usama

Introduction

The ultimate goal of the project is to compare and contrast the performances of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, only, over time and space (season / country respectively), primarily via geographical plots.
The datasets, compiled by Azmine Toushik Wasi and sourced from Kaggle, provides a detailed insight into the performances of two legendary footballers: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. These datasets offer a comprehensive view of their contributions across various seasons, competitions, matches, and events.
- ronaldo.csv: It has 13 variables such as season, competition, result, opponent etc. In total, it has 701 rows indicating the 701 goals scored by Cristiano Ronaldo up until 2022.
- messi.csv: It has the same 13 variables such as season, competition, result, opponent etc. In total, it has 698 rows indicating the 698 goals scored by Lionel Messi up until 2022.

First, we created animations using gganimate. It shows the world map highlighting countries where Messi and Ronaldo scored goals for a particular year over the period from 2005 to 2022. It also displays total number of goals scored by each player in all matches in that year.
We also made an interactive world map using plotly where we highlighted the countries where both the players reigned and showed their total scores in the countries respectively.
Then, using CSS, HTML we created comparison plots between Messi and Ronaldo’s scores which can be filtered and displayed based on various factors like Country, Competition, Opponent, Match Day, Last Minute Goals.

In year 2012 Messi scored highest goals of 74 whereas in 2013, Ronaldo scored highest goals of 58.
Messi scored higher goals than Ronaldo in years viz. 2009-2010, 2012, 2016-2019, 2022 whereas Ronaldo scored higher than Messi in the years 2005-2008,2013-2015, 2020.

The total goals scored by Messi in these years are 652 whereas goals scored by Ronaldo in the same period are 654.
So the performance of both players looks almost comparable in terms of goals scored with Ronaldo scoring marginally higher total scores than Messi
From 2005 to 2022, globally, Messi has scored more goals than Ronaldo in a total of 11 countries whereas Ronaldo has outscored Messi in a total of 13 countries; out of all matches played by both

From the investigation, by analyzing the geographical maps and comparison plots, we can conclude that Ronaldo has scored marginally higher scores and has had a better career than Messi, especially considering renowed competitions, their performance in famous countries till date.

A limitaton is that the data for both players is available from 2005 to 2022, although their careers started earlier to this in different countries through different competitions. So the comparison between two players is made only for this duration of 18 years.
In addition, there are more features that could have been scrutinised, such as penalties only or free-kicks only, but for the overall career story, it is more effective to showcase all the goals scored throughout their careers to highlight the success they have attained.