Juventus are currently on the longest run of consecutive titles ever won in any major European league — and since moving there in 2018, Cristiano Ronaldo has helped to turn seven into nine.
That mirrors Ronaldo’s tactical development — in his final seasons at Real Madrid, he transformed from a No 7 into a No 9, and his move to Juventus made a lot of sense. Ronaldo was guaranteed goalscoring opportunities, ideal for a player so concerned by his individual statistics, and near-guaranteed titles too. Sure enough, he’s added to the three Premier League medals he won with Manchester United, and the two La Liga titles he won in Madrid.
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Ronaldo’s style has transformed dramatically in the 17 years since he joined Manchester United, and there have been two major shifts. The first came midway through his time at Old Trafford, when he exploded from an inconsistent, tricky stepover merchant into a ruthless goalscoring machine.
The second happened two-thirds of the way through his time at Real Madrid, when he stopped being a powerful counter-attacking force capable of striking from long-range, and increasingly seemed to be a more straightforward centre-forward, waiting in the box and tucking home simple goalscoring chances.
His final three goals for Real Madrid were illustrative — turning home two efforts from team-mates that might have been going in anyway and scoring a six-yard header against Villarreal.
Ronaldo had become a poacher — but nevertheless a masterful one. His final campaign for Real Madrid brought 44 goals in 44 appearances, which meant he ended his nine years in Spain with a record better than a goal per game.
Ronaldo was 33 upon his move to Italy — and it wasn’t simply Juventus that suited him, but Serie A as a whole too. The Italian top flight has changed dramatically from the days when it felt more defensive than other major leagues, but the pace of matches still seems a little more patient, which perhaps explains why goalscorers seem to prosper for longer in Italy.
Luca Toni won the Capocannoniere as Serie A’s top goalscorer in 2014-15, at the age of 38. Fabio Quagliarella did it three years later at 36. Go back further and you’ll find 33-year-old Alessandro Del Piero and 35-year-old Dario Hubner taking the crown. The current top goalscorer? The 39-year-old Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Juventus-era Cristiano Ronaldo would seemingly be about goals, and nothing else — waiting in the box for service and slamming the ball home.
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The reality, however, has been somewhat different.
Ronaldo hasn’t continued his path towards becoming a pure No 9. We’re not seeing peak Ronaldo — but there has been a slight rejuvenation of his all-round game.
For a start, Ronaldo is involved more in build-up play than during his final years at Real Madrid. His period at the Bernabeu shows a steady, consistent drop in how many passes he played per game, but since moving to Juventus he’s been involved more. In his sole season under Maurizio Sarri he was playing 37 passes per game, comparable to his numbers from 2011-12. That number has dropped a little this season, but Ronaldo has started only four Serie A games and therefore the sample size is somewhat small.
It’s a very similar story in terms of dribbling. In Ronaldo’s first season at Real, he was attempting more than six dribbles per game — a figure that dropped to two in his final season. Ronaldo is a long way from his peak levels here, but again there’s been a notable rise at Juventus.
So Ronaldo is essentially doing more aside from scoring goals; he’s involved more, he’s creating more, he’s beating opponents more. But Ronaldo cares primarily about goals. So what are his goalscoring numbers doing? Well, while his raw goalscoring numbers remain healthy, they’ve been boosted heavily by the number of penalties Ronaldo has scored. Take away penalties, and his goalscoring rate is significantly lower than we ever witnessed at Real.
His shot numbers, too, are lower than in his final La Liga season.
More interesting, though, is where Ronaldo’s taking shots from, and how he’s taking them.
In Ronaldo’s first eight seasons at Real, he was generally attempting less than 50 per cent of his shots from inside the box — he loved shooting from long-range, often having cut inside from inside-left positions. There was a notable change midway through his time at Real — suddenly the proportion of his overall shots from inside the box hit 60 per cent, then 70 per cent in his penultimate campaign, before nearly hitting 80 per cent in his last season. That journey from 46 per cent to 79 per cent is significant — it’s the equivalent of Ronaldo going from being Darren Fletcher to Sergio Aguero.
That’s inevitably reflected by the huge change in the number of league goals Ronaldo scored from outside the box per season. This was never below five in his first seven campaigns at Real, before falling dramatically to the point where he didn’t score a single goal from outside the box in his final year. At Juventus, he’s been a little more prolific from range. Again, not to peak Ronaldo levels, but still an upward curve.
Another notable metric is how many goals Ronaldo scored from what Opta define as counter-attacking situations. In his first season under Jose Mourinho, Ronaldo reached double figures in that respect.
The numbers towards the end of the graph are very similar to the above graph. Ronaldo didn’t score a single counter-attacking goal in his final season at Real, but has managed one and two since moving to Serie A.
And how about considering Ronaldo’s headed goals?
Perhaps his most famous Serie A goal came away at Sampdoria with an absurd towering header at the far post, but this has been the exception to the rule.
Ronaldo is scoring fewer headers since moving to Italy — he’s less of a target man than he became at the Bernabeu.
Indeed, the proportion of his attempts with his head reached 20 per cent in Madrid, equivalent to Troy Deeney, whose Premier League career average is 23.5 per cent. It’s dropped by around five per cent in Italy — a little like some of the other numbers, reflecting that Ronaldo hasn’t returned to the peak of his early Real years, but is more at an in-between level.
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Free kicks are another part of Ronaldo’s game, and once again set him apart from the rest. For a start, the sheer volume that Ronaldo attempted in his early seasons at Madrid is unmatched when compared to the recent Premier League era. Kevin De Bruyne is averaging 0.8 attempts at goal per 90 minutes from a dead-ball situation — Ronaldo averaged that figure (or higher) in six consecutive seasons from 2009-10 to 2014-15. He’s never stooped below one attempt every other game throughout his career and has even seen his attempts rise at Juve after years of decline back to “normal” levels at Real Madrid.
In terms of goalscoring from free kicks though, Ronaldo has become far less potent. He was averaging a goal roughly every 10 games from a free kick in the early stages of his career, but more recently he’s averaged one in every 20 or so games, and none at all in 2017-18, 2018-19 and his first four league games of 20-21.
Combined, those two figures of attempts and goals paint a picture of a player who’s always tried to score plenty of free kicks but has been so-so at converting them. Overall, his conversion rate is six per cent but when you consider that the five-year Premier League average is 9.2 per cent, perhaps this is the one area of Ronaldo’s game that he’s failed to truly analyse and improve as he’s got older: since 2016-17 he’s scored just two goals from 68 attempts.
Comparing Ronaldo’s last season at Real Madrid to his current one, we can see that he’s getting on the ball in different areas. In fact, in Andrea Pirlo’s system, Ronaldo is touching the ball far more often than he does before, without also having fewer touches in the box.
He’s able to drop deep and combine just outside the penalty area, while still touching the ball nearly 11 times per 90 within it.
Pirlo started the campaign playing a 3-4-1-2 system with Ronaldo essentially being used as a centre-forward. But ahead of the match with Barcelona — which Ronaldo eventually missed because of a COVID-19 test — Pirlo said he intended to field Ronaldo in his “classic centre-left position” in a front three.
And it seems that’s what Pirlo thinks he’s working with — something approaching the “classic” version of Ronaldo, rather than the limited, static version we might have expected.
(Graphic created for The Athletic by Tom Slator)