Messi vs Ronaldo in 2015: treble, five goals, copa defeat.

Ronaldo scored 57 in 2015 to Messi's 52 — his fifth-best year against Messi's seventh, a margin of 5. The headline moment was Ronaldo's: five goals in 30 minutes against Granada on 5 April, which made him only the third Real Madrid player ever to score five in a top-flight match.

Messi's year was defined by a trophy and a defeat. The 2014–15 season he completed in June was a treble — Champions League, La Liga and Copa del Rey — with 58 goals in 57 games. A month later, on 4 July, Argentina lost the Copa América final to Chile on penalties in Santiago after a goalless 120 minutes. It was his third senior international final and his third defeat.

He won the Ballon d'Or anyway, his fifth, with Ronaldo second. Between 2008 and 2017 the two filled the top two places in nine of the ten editions; 2010, when Iniesta and Xavi joined Messi on the podium, is the exception.

Pep Guardiola, who managed Messi at Barcelona from 2008 to 2012, offered the most-quoted assessment of that period: "Don't write about him, don't try to describe him. Just watch him."

2015 sits in the middle of the shared La Liga decade rather than at the end of it — both men were in Spain until Ronaldo left for Juventus in July 2018, and on different continents only from 2023. Their 109 combined goals is the 16th-lowest of the 22 years on record, which is to say it was an ordinary year by the standards of this particular pair.