Messi and Ronaldo are two years apart, which quietly distorts every year-by-year comparison ever made. Drag through this timeline and you can watch both careers unfold against each other in real time — the early years at Barcelona and Manchester United, the Spanish peak, the divergence into Italy, France, Saudi Arabia and Miami.
For the fairer version of the same comparison, our same-age pages line them up at identical ages rather than identical dates.