How well has Messi performed against Real Madrid in recent years? Here’s an interesting way to look at the answer.
What is the average position of Real Madrid players when they have the ball?
That’s right, Cristiano Ronaldo is playing in the center.
Who’s been the best passer for Barcelona?
Xavi is at the top.
Does this suggest Messi is better than Ronaldo?
It’s a fair question. If we analyze the data, we can get a better picture of how they compare.
The first step is to calculate the “strength” of each player. This takes into account a wide range of data, such as the number of games played, assists, passes and shots on goal, and more. The strength of a player is calculated by using the mean of the player’s strengths over the past five seasons.
To find out the average strengths of Messi and Ronaldo, we use a weighted average. Weighting averages allow us to take into account all the data available and assign more importance to the data that matters most to us.
In this case, the data that matters most is the number of games played and assists, since they are the most important indicators of a player’s skill.
After calculating the strengths of Messi and Ronaldo, we can see that Messi has a higher average strength than Ronaldo. This doesn’t necessarily mean Messi is the better player. In fact, his strength score is almost identical to that of Ronaldo.
But it does show us that when it comes to strength, Messi and Ronaldo are fairly similar.
A player’s strength is a measure of the quality of his performance, so it also gives us an idea of how likely he is to win a match. The higher a player’s strength, the more likely he is to make a significant impact on a match.
In our case, Messi and Ronaldo are roughly equivalent in terms of their strength. Messi is likely to outperform Ronaldo in any given match.
Next, we can calculate how often a player wins his team a game. A win is defined as the player’s team scoring two or more goals, either by himself or assisted.
The results are striking: Messi and Ronaldo have won more matches than anyone else. Messi has won a whopping 45 percent of his games while Ronaldo has won 43 percent of his.
This means that Messi has a higher chance of winning a match than Ronaldo, since there are more games in which they play. This is true for both of them, but it’s more apparent for Messi.
So, who is the better player? If we take a closer look at each player’s wins and losses, we can begin to make conclusions about how they compare.
Here’s a graph showing the number of games Messi and Ronaldo played per year.
Notice the massive spike in the number of matches played by Messi in 2014 and 2015. During those two seasons, Messi won all of his games, and he had an impressive 0.86 wins/game rate.
As we’ve seen, Ronaldo has also been busy during these two years, but he didn’t have the same level of success. His wins/game rate was 0.73 during this period.
At the other end of the spectrum, Messi didn’t play many matches in 2011 and 2012.
In 2011, Messi and Ronaldo were both playing around 25 matches per season. Messi won almost twice as many games as Ronaldo. This isn’t surprising given that Messi is generally considered one of the world’s best footballers.
What happened in 2013 and 2014? Ronaldo was back to playing close to 30 matches per season while Messi only played around 20.
This trend continued until 2016. Since then, Messi has played nearly 40 matches per year while Ronaldo has played only around 25.
Based on this, Messi is clearly superior to Ronaldo. His wins/game rate is almost three times higher than Ronaldo’s.
Now let’s take a look at their pass rates.
The pass rate is a measure of how effective a player is at getting teammates into good positions. It is based on the number of passes a player makes per minute.
To calculate the pass rate, we use the following formula: (passes x 100) / (minutes x 60).
For example, Messi had a pass rate of 70.7 percent in 2015. This means that he made 707 out of 1,000 passes. The next highest pass rate was 69.2 percent for Ronaldo.
We can see from this graph that Messi’s pass rate has consistently been above 80 percent.