Goals
The headline number both players are chasing is the all-time men's record, currently held by Ronaldo. Here is how the totals look underneath.
Difference
50
Ronaldo's lead in career goals
Penalty share
19%
of Ronaldo's career goals are penalties; Messi's share is ~13%
Single-year record
91
Messi's 2012 calendar-year total — still the all-time record
Both players hit a peak in the early 2010s and held a 40-plus-goal cadence for almost a decade. The 2012 spike for Messi is the single most productive calendar year in football history.
Messi · scoring profile
About 80% of Messi's career goals come off his left foot. Right-foot goals are mostly improvisations in the box. Headers are vanishingly rare — he is one of the great non-aerial goal-scorers in history. The free-kick column is his late-career signature: inside one five-year stretch at Barcelona he scored more direct free kicks than most teams.
Ronaldo · scoring profile
Ronaldo is the most positionally complete scorer of the modern era. He has scored 150+ headers — more than many strikers' entire career totals — plus prolific tallies with both feet. His 185 penalty goals is the highest in football history, which reflects both how many he has taken and how reliably he has converted them.
Career-goal totals include senior club football, senior international football and continental club competition. They exclude youth and reserve teams, unofficial friendlies and tour games not recognised by FIFA. Hat-trick totals include "perfect" hat-tricks (left foot, right foot, header) alongside standard ones. Penalties are counted as goals — every league counts them that way.
Every calendar year both careers span, with each player's goals for that year, the clubs they were at, and what happened. The year-by-year index has the same 22 years as a single sortable table, with the margin and combined total for each.