Cristiano Ronaldo made his Manchester United debut versus Bolton in August 2003. David Beckham had been tossed to Real Madrid a few months previously after receiving a swift football boot to the head from Alex Ferguson, and this gawky, rather spotty 18-year-old had presented himself as the Red Devils’ upgraded No.7 with a 29-minute cameo of feints, trickery, and stepovers. There are a lot of stepovers.
We watched open-mouthed from the sofa of our student flats, five drinks to the wind after an impromptu excursion to the pub, urgently wondering if the blur in front of us had anything to do with an evening’s intoxication. The mythology of CR7 was born, at least in our eyes.
Just about 13 and a half years later, seeing an 18-year-old Kylian Mbappe for the first time, a few kilometers across the same city, prompted a similar revelation, minus the amber nectar. Despite Monaco’s 5-3 loss to Manchester City in the Champions League last 16 in February 2017, the Frenchman’s goal and show-stealing brilliance sparked the same astonishment and belief that this was a historic ability.
Mbappe, who made his senior debut for Monaco in mid-December 2015 when still 16 years old, had a nine-month head start on Ronaldo, who made his professional debut for Sporting in September 2002 when he was 17 years old. Considering his early debut, the Frenchman has only 11 senior outings under his belt than Ronaldo did at the same age. Remarkably, all of these have come in club football; prior to this evening’s match, the two had a combined total of 46 international caps.
Surprisingly, the number of minutes the two have accrued from those performances differs significantly. Mbappe, who is 22 and a half years old, has 1,589 more minutes on his clock than Ronaldo, demonstrating that he has become more important sooner in his career.
Ronaldo didn’t play a full game for Portugal until his 11th cap when he played all 120 minutes of Portugal’s Euro 2004 shootout victory over England. That was the game in which Ricardo, the goalkeeper, took off his gloves to deny Darius Vassell. That should go into your fact pipe.
Unlike the arch poacher he has become, Ronaldo 1.0 was a quick-footed winger – some might call him a one-trick pony, particularly until his revelation 2006/07 season – who was relegated to the bench and had yet to develop the eye for goal that has propelled him to the brink of worldwide goalscoring eternal life.
CR7 had scored 72 goals at the age of Mbappe, compared to the Frenchman, who has scored over a century more due to his position as a genuine center-forward. And a deadly one at that: he’s netted more than 20 goals in each of his last five seasons, a feat Ronaldo has only accomplished once in the same time span.
By this point in their careers, they had both scored 17 times in internationals, implying that they held identical records for games and goals for their own countries at the same age. The two players have comparable assist totals, yet Mbappe edges out the competition. In comparison to Ronaldo’s 69 assists, the Frenchman has set up a teammate on 23 more occasions. CR7 is unable to pass shock. Reports Four Four Two.
