Phoenix

I know I’ll end up writing about this properly one day. I keep seeing the same claim recycled online that “Ronaldo was a midfielder.” It always surprises me. Did you guys actually watch him, or has the line just been repeated so many times that it’s become accepted? I see it in arguments a lot. Ronaldo was never a midfielder and has never ever been a midfielder. In the early-to-mid 2000s, 4-4-2 was still the formation almost every team used, so wide players were routinely listed as RMF or LMF, please confirm this if you weren’t born then because recently I found out I was arguing with a boy born in 2009. The word “winger” was used less often than it is today. That doesn’t mean those players were midfielders in the modern sense. At Man United, Ronaldo lined up on the right (and sometimes left) of a 4-4-2 or 4-5-1. His job was to take on full-backs, beat them, and either cross or drive into dangerous areas. Crossing was more common then. He has always been an attacking wide player from the start. He was not a midfielder sitting deeper and recycling possession or dictating play, he has never been, why do yo guys push lies and all of a sudden people now use that in arguments that Ronaldo was once a midfielder. Calling him a midfielder because of how team sheets were written in the 4-4-2 era is mostly a semantic argument. By today’s positional language, he was a winger. The distinction matters when people try to use “he was a midfielder” as a way to downplay his goalscoring numbers from those seasons or to reframe his career. He was a wide attacker who later evolved into a more central forward. The formation labels of the era don’t change what he was actually doing on the pitch If this is what you mean by wide midfielder in your tweet, then I totally agree with you brother, but I have seen this term used in a way that tells a story about Ronaldo being an outright midfielder, he was never ever one. If anyone has spent large parts of games as a midfielder/playmaker, it’s Messi. I have put a video of Messi in the 2011 Champions League final. I can dare you to show me footage from that era till date where Ronaldo consistently occupied midfield positions like that for sustained periods, not just in transition. Meanwhile, I can show you 2026 Messi still doing what you can see in that 2011 video. Frame 2 in comments is typical of where Messi has operated for most of his career (up to the 2026 World Cup). He has spent long stretches deeper, linking play and creating, yet still averages more goals than Ronaldo. Messi has played 100s of games as the primary creator. He has often been the sole playmaker in his teams, combining chance creation with goalscoring. He was winning top-scorer awards while winning playmaker awards but yeah, you still prefer Ronaldo to him and now you’re killing Haaland. Ronaldo has a strong assist record, but he has never been a true playmaker who dictates tempo or sustains high chance-creation numbers the way Messi has. They’re not the same profile. Same way Kane and Haaland are different. Ronaldo’s game also shifted early at Real Madrid. By his second season (2010/11), the dribbles dropped as he prioritised goals and efficiency. You know how crazy Ronaldo is about numbers. Frame 3 in comments shows his dribbles per game in a season, you can clearly see the volume kept falling as the years went on. He became more of a pure goalscorer/poacher which is fine. My point is if you prefer Kane to Haaland, and criticising Haaland, why then do you prefer Messi to Ronaldo. Messi that does EVERYTHING for 20 years, he did not sacrifice any part of his game to focus on one part, so why? However, to be fair to many of you, it was the old version you guys fell in love with, let me hear your thoughts though.