Lionel Messi is ranked as one of the four best players of all time by Real Madrid and Brazil legend Ronaldo Nazario.
Ronaldo, who first rose to prominence at Barcelona before joining Inter Milan, is regarded as one of the greatest football players of all time. The Brazilian had two potentially fatal knee injuries on the Italian side, partly as a result of degeneration.
But as one of the “Galacticos” at Real Madrid, “El Fenomeno” overcame those enormous failures to have some of the best years of his career.
In 2002, four years after a great deal of controversy surrounded his appearance in the championship game, he again won the World Cup with Brazil.
Hours before the match against France, Ronaldo had a seizure, but he was cleared to play. He didn’t have much of an influence, though, as Brazil lost 2-0.
After winning the World Cup three times, the three-time FIFA World Player of the Year spent five more years at the Bernabeu before retiring in 2011 after stints with AC Milan and Corinthians.
He is among the greatest attackers to have ever played the game, having scored over 400 goals for both club and country. Speaking at a Santander Bank-hosted event in 2021, Ronaldo also shared his selections for the four best football players he has ever seen.
He said (quotes via Goal): “For me, in the classification of the best in history, the four names would be Pele, [Diego] Maradona, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
“They are the top four in the history of football.“
Despite the fact that he naturally excluded himself from his own ranking, several of Ronaldo’s peers have voted him the greatest player of all time.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic stated to Discovery Plus in 2021: “I always say you have the players that play the game, and the players that are the game.
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For me, Ronaldo is the game. When you watch him play, everyone wanted to play like him and become like him.
“The way he was moving, the way he did his stepovers, the way he did ‘the snake’. For me, he’s the greatest player through history, no doubt.”
