Ronaldo, Messi and Pele's incredible goalscoring world records

Cristiano Ronaldo raised two fingers to the haters with an electric performance for Manchester United on Sunday night.

Despite the five-time Ballon d’Or winner having been widely criticised at times during his return to the Premier League, there can be no denying his importance to the Red Devils when it comes to key moments.

Ronaldo smashed home a stunning hat-trick in the 3-2 win over Tottenham Hotspur to keep United‘s top four hopes alive, including an opening goal that had shades of his iconic FC Porto strike.

However, perhaps even more notable than hitting Spurs for three were reports that Ronaldo’s treble at the ‘Theatre of Dream’s had seen him become the greatest goalscorer in men’s football history.

It’s widely accepted that Ronaldo now has 807 career goals to his name, but it depends on whose statistics you believe in terms of whether or not that makes the Portuguese star the all-time number one.

Well, according to talkSPORT’s maths, the answer is an emphatic ‘yes’ with the Tottenham hat-trick seeing him move above the 805 strikes that FIFA reportedly assign to Josef Bican.

Now, other statisticians will tell you that Ronaldo had achieved the feat already and the Czech FA would argue that Ronaldo needs 822 goals to break the record, so it’s a complicated situation.

However, the revered number-crunchers over at The International Federation of Football History and Statistics (IFFHS) always make for a useful touchstone when it comes to marauding through all the data.

And on the back of Ronaldo’s hat-trick, they not only corroborated his status as the all-time record goalscorer in the men’s game, but also declared that he now holds five stunning world records.

That’s because IFFHS decided to list their nine selections