After Juventus’ elimination from the Champions League against Porto, rumours of Cristiano Ronaldo leaving the club at the end of the season have started again. Former Juventus President Giovanni Cobolli Gigli heavily criticized the Portuguese superstar saying he was “a bad signing, absolutely”.
In this situation and immersed in a complicated season themselves, Real Madrid have emerged as the favourites to sign Ronaldo again. It’s easy to see Real Madrid have never been able to replace the Portuguese and he’s still regarded as the best player in the club’s history so a move back to Los Blancos would make sense from the ‘feelings’ side too.
But it’s inevitable to think there must be other options that could be better for Real Madrid and Juventus than the 36-year-old Ronaldo. In this data analysis, we’ll look at some alternatives that would represent better value for money and contribute differently than the Portuguese international.
Methodology
We first used Total Football Analysis’ in-house tool xGold to get a shortlist of players who are statistically similar to Ronaldo. We put a minimum value of €15 million to include only well-known players who could be ready to play for a top team. The list was composed of 47 players and we also included Ronaldo in the analysis to compare him. The full list of players with the transfermarkt value is below.
As explained later in the analysis, only players who score or can score at a similar rate as Ronaldo’s are considered for the rest of the sections.
All the data used have been taken from Wyscout and refer to the last calendar year. The grey area in the graphs is the one between the 25th and 75th percentile, meaning 50% of the players fall in that area for every given metric. Ronaldo’s values are marked with a thin grey line so we can quickly compare him to the rest of the players.
