Cristiano Ronaldo vs Lionel Messi: Stats settle the debate each season since 2009/10

The Lionel Messi vs Cristiano Ronaldo debate is done and dusted for another season.

While the two Ballon d’Or-winning juggernauts have found themselves taking something of a back seat in the 2021/22 campaign, it’s still done little to stop supporters discussing which player is better.

Just because Messi made a quiet start to life at Paris Saint-Germain and Ronaldo turned out for a truly terrible Manchester United side, it doesn’t make the eternal debate between the two of them any less fun.

Besides, the 2021/22 season marked arguably one of the most fascinating comparisons between the two seeing as they both moved clubs simultaneously for the first time in their careers.

And fear not, ladies and gentlemen, because we’ve already crunched the numbers to see which player came out on top this season in everything from goals to assists and trophies to Man of the Match awards.

That being said, we now want to go one step further and see how the battle of whits between Ronaldo and Messi across the 2021/22 campaign factors into their career-long rivalry as a whole.

To do that, we’re turning to one of the most comprehensive statistics measures out there: the player rating system over at WhoScored.

As one of football’s leading stats websites, WhoScored awards each player in the biggest leagues a rating out of 10 based on every game that they feature in, which is informed by a whole range of data sets.

And when that’s averaged out over the course of the season, there’s good reason to think that it’s one of the most effective measures by which we can establish the best-performing players of them all.

How does that apply to Ronaldo vs Messi? Well, we’ve seen who had the superior average player rating in league football across every