It's a rivalry that can become a little bit tiresome, but there is no question that the battle between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo for supremacy has defined the recent era of football when it comes to deciding who the best player of the era is.
Personally, I would say that accolade should lie at Messi's feet, but that is not a slight on Ronaldo's ability.
Both have scoring rates that have rarely been seen before in the modern game.
But a study published in The Economist suggests that it's Messi's goals have more value in the sense that a 90th minute winner is of greater importance than a the fourth or fifth goal in a rout, using a metric called Expected Points Added or EPA.
They explained their hypothesis in the full article, which you can read here: "So what happens when this analysis is applied to every single goal scored by the game’s two leading lights in La Liga, the pan-European Champions League and the World Cup during 2013 and 2014? Mr Ronaldo’s edge all but vanishes. The pride of Portugal’s 105 goals contributed 41.6 EP to Real Madrid and his national squad, an average of 0.40 EPA per goal. Although he assured himself a second straight Ballon d’Or with three goals in the semi-final and final of last year’s Champions League, all of them were mere pile-ons. In the return leg against Bayern Munich, he scored when Los Blancos already led 3-0 and 4-0 in the aggregate, for a combined EPA of just 0.29. And in the final, his score was a penalty kick in extra time when Real Madrid already enjoyed a 3-1 lead, yielding a trivial 0.004 of EPA. In contrast, the supposedly slumping Mr Messi squeezed 40.3 EPA from his 86 goals, an average of 0.47 each. He showed a remarkable knack for scoring when it counted: on five different occasions in 2013 and 2014, he netted a tie-breaking goal in the final 20 minutes of a contest. In other words, the Argentine’s 20% deficit in raw goals relative to Mr Ronaldo was almost entirely offset by a 20% advantage in the importance of the goals he did score."
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