Football
Ronaldo completed his cherished goal by 95.6%. Messi can’t catch him anymore
The Portuguese is just a little bit away from reaching a thousand goals in his career.
The correspondence confrontation between the two greatest football players of the 21st century continues even at the end of their careers. 38-year-old Lionel Messi is shining in the USA, and Cristiano Ronaldo, who is two years older than the Argentine, continues to churn out goals in Saudi Arabia. He scored a couple more for Al-Nasr last Saturday.
Throughout the history of football, a very small number of players have managed to reach the mark of thousands of goals in their career. In the foreseeable future, Ronaldo should join their number, who has 44 goals left to enter the elite club.
The whole team works for Ronaldo
This season, Al-Nasr clearly intends to achieve the long-awaited championship, which the richest club has not been able to win for six years. Ronaldo has not won anything serious at the club level since 2020, when he managed to take the Scudetto with Juventus. To achieve this goal, Al-Nasr bought another 100 million euros before the season, signing Kingsley Coman from Bayern, Joao Felix from Chelsea, as well as French defender Mohamed Semakan from Leipzig, who became the most expensive summer acquisition. In addition, the leader of the Barcelona defense, Inago Martinez, joined the team as a free agent.
On Saturday, “Al-Nasr” confidently dealt with the outsider of the season “Al-Ahdud” (3:0) in the next match of the Saudi Pro League. In nine previous rounds, the team led by Portuguese Jorge Jesus did not lose a single point. The winning streak continued largely thanks to Ronaldo. He opened the scoring in the 30th minute, finishing at the far post after a throw-in from his teammate. At the end of the first half, ex-Inter star Marcelo Brozovic passed the ball to the empty net for the Portuguese. In general, Ronaldo has been scoring most of his goals lately in this way: he finds a position in someone else’s penalty area and connects with passes from his partners.
For the 40-year-old striker, this goal was the 40th in 2025 and the 956th in his career. Apparently, Ronaldo is not going to give up football until he reaches the coveted thousand goals, although he does not like to touch on this topic when communicating with the press. Probably so as not to jinx it.
– Let’s enjoy the moment, the present. I don’t have a goal to score 1000 goals. If it happens, great, if not, no. The present moment is the most special thing, not something that can happen,” Ronaldo said in April.
For the clubs and national team, Ronaldo’s goals, which began his career back in 2002, were distributed as follows:
- Real – 450
- Manchester United – 145
- Portugal team – 143
- Al-Nasr – 112
- Juventus – 101
- Sporting – 5
Until the end of the year, Cristiano will have the opportunity to increase his personal goal tally in the game against Al-Ittifaq, which will take place on December 30. In January, Al-Nasr’s schedule is as busy as possible – seven matches in the championship. Ronaldo has not missed a single game in the Pro League this season, playing 90 minutes in each.
The anniversary goal is expected in 2027
Ronaldo’s phenomenal professionalism allows him to remain relevant in modern football even at 40 years old. Of course, now in his arsenal there are no spectacular passes with a subsequent strike, but experience and talent allow him to bring real benefits to the team even after losing speed.
If anyone is confused by the level of the Saudi Arabian championship, then Ronaldo has an answer for that too. In 2025, he scored six goals for Portugal, including against Germany, Spain and Denmark. Some consider the aging forward a liability for the Portuguese, but Ronaldo was an important factor in the national team’s victory in the Nations League last year.
If Ronaldo maintains his current scoring rate, then the coveted thousand should submit to him at the beginning of 2027. Cristiano does not intend to give up football in the near future, as evidenced by his contract with Al-Nasr, which is valid for another year and a half.
In history, only five players have managed to reach the 1,000-goal mark. We are talking only about confirmed data. The best scorer in the history of football is considered to be the Austrian Josef Bican, whose career spanned the period from 1931 to 1957. The exact number of his goals during his career is unknown, but according to the most conservative estimates, we are talking about the figure 1481.
Top 5 scorers in football history
- Josef Bican (Austria/Czechoslovakia) – 1481 goals
- Gerd Müller (Germany) – 1461
- Pele (Brazil) – 1281
- Ferenc Puskás (Hungary/Spain) – 1139
- Romario (Brazil) – 1003
Ronaldo’s Thousand promises to be flawless from a statistical point of view. There is still a lot of debate about what level of matches Pele and Romario accumulated their statistics in. It is no less difficult to deal with the archives of the 60-70s of the last century. For Cristiano, every goal was recorded on video, and only official matches for the club were counted.
If we return to the eternal dispute between Ronaldo and Messi, then in terms of goals scored, the Argentinean is noticeably inferior to the Portuguese – 896 versus 956. At the same time, if we take 2025 separately, then Lionel has a slight advantage – 46 versus 40. Still, it will be incredibly difficult for him to catch up with Cristiano, even taking into account his younger age. It’s hard to believe that the distance of 60 goals will be overcome by the end of his career. Firstly, Ronaldo is not going to go anywhere, and secondly, Messi is unlikely to be able to produce another season with 40+ goals. The outgoing year was unique in this regard: in 2025 alone he scored more than in the previous two.
Source: Sportbox
Thomas Astudillo is a sports journalist and author who writes for Sportish. He has a deep love and knowledge of sports, and is known for his engaging and informative writing on the latest sports news and events.