Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Barcelona’s Lionel Messi have both been omitted from the top 10 of ESPN’s list of the most dominant athletes of the last 20 years.
ESPN produced the list of the most dominant athletes of the last 20 years to celebrate the 20th anniversary of ESPN The Magazine.
The American broadcaster used a five-step process to determine the most dominant athletes of the past 20 years where they looked at the top league in every sport that has global annual revenues of $100 million or more and for which there are reliable annual overall rankings or ratings of individual athletes for all or most of the past 20 years.
They then rated those sports’ athletes in each of the past 20 regular seasons by the best single performance metric available, adjusted these ratings to normalize athletes’ scores in each sport across time, narrowed their focus to the top four athletes each year in every sport, then adjusted the data again to put these players, across sports, on a common baseline.
They then added up the results to achieve this list, in which one “dominance share” equals one standard deviation of performance by an athlete beyond the top four players in his or her sport for one season.
Whatever their methodology, they omitted the two winners of the last nine Ballon d’Or’s in Ronaldo and Messi, the two leading goalscorers in the history of the Champions League and a pair that have 1,119 club goals between them.
For Messi, Dan Hadjucky wrote: “His proclivity for finding the net has regularly defied logic. His record-setting 91-goal campaign in 2012? That’s a goal every four days. His 541 goals in 625 games for Barcelona? That’s 0.87 goals per game. Almost nothing has eluded the five-time Ballon d’Or winner (and five-time runner-up; both tied for most nods) … save for a major trophy with his native Argentina.”
Meanwhile for Ronaldo, Sachin David Chandan wrote: “Anything the Beautiful Game’s greatest can do, Cristiano Ronaldo can do better. Or at least faster. This month, the Portuguese star scored his 300th La Liga goal — the second player in history to reach that threshold, after Lionel Messi. The difference? Forty-eight, to be exact. Ronaldo needed only 286 games to Messi’s 334.
“Yes, any way you slice it, Ronaldo is a scoring terror. Since joining Real Madrid in 2009, he has averaged more than a goal a game, which makes a kind of ridiculous sense when you consider he collects goals in bunches: 49 career hat tricks, 33 in La Liga alone, the most in league history.”
You can read ESPN’s full list here.
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