Messi vs Ronaldo in 2007: ronaldo's 42-goal breakout.

2007 is the most lopsided year of the rivalry's early period. Ronaldo scored 42 goals to Messi's 17 — a margin of 25, the 2nd-largest of any year Ronaldo led. It was the breakout: the 2007–08 season that straddles this year brought Ronaldo 42 goals in 49 games for Manchester United, the Premier League title, his first Champions League and his first Ballon d'Or. For Messi, 17 goals made this one of the two quietest years of his career, level with 2006 and his joint-20th-highest total.

The quality was already there even if the volume was not. On 10 March 2007, a 19-year-old Messi scored three at the Camp Nou in a 3–3 draw with Real Madrid — his first senior hat-trick, and the first evidence that he could decide a Clásico on his own. Four months later he played his first senior international final, losing the 2007 Copa América 0–3 to Brazil at the age of 20. It would be fourteen years and four more finals before he won one.

Neither man won the Ballon d'Or in 2007. Kaká did, at AC Milan, with Ronaldo second and Messi third — the first of eleven years in which both would finish on the podium together.

Put in series, 2007 is the low point of Messi's output and the launch of Ronaldo's. Their 59 combined goals is the 5th-lowest of the 22 years on record. Within five years the same pair would score 154 in a single calendar year. Nothing about 2007 predicts that.