Ronaldo opened the debate about which era was the best in football history and compared himself with Messi and Cristiano

Ronaldo Luis Nazário de Lima was a world football star. After his explosion at Barcelona in the mid-90s, the Brazilian striker left his mark on his time at Inter Milan and then at Real Madrid. In addition, she became the goalscorer of the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup, which ended with Brazil's national team as world champion after beating Germany in the final.

Just as El Fenomenon's career began to end, the appearance of two young stars broke into the world of football. From the end of 2000, it was when Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo began a sports battle to see who was the best footballer on the planet. One in the Catalan team, and the other first at Manchester United and then at the White House they put together a heads-up that resulted in duels for prizes and titles.

In the last few hours, it was Ronaldo himself who gave his opinion about the time when he shone and compared it to the era that La Pulga and CR7 dominated. “All records will be broken, even those of Messi and Ronaldo today will be broken in the future. Records are made for this. But it's hard to compare one generation with another. There are no correct criteria to do this,” began in his analysis the Brazilian crack that emerged in Cruzeiro in dialogue with Alessandro Del Piero for the Sky Sport network in Italy.

“But if you ask me which generation to choose, I say ours, but without a doubt... We were really many and very good. Very good ones. Today is not that they are not good, Cristiano and Messi are. Just like Neymar... But the others are missing, who have not reached their level. Before there was more competition and not only in Italy, but also in Spain and England,” he added in his explanation with the former Italian player who was also an outstanding footballer.

Then, Ronaldo took the opportunity to refer to how football evolved in recent years related to the physical preparation that players endure. But in turn he made a counterpoint to the technique that existed when he played and in which there were references of all kinds such as his compatriots Ronaldinho and Rivaldo, the Portuguese Figo, the Englishman Michael Owen, the Czech Pavel Nedved, the Ukrainian Shevchenko or the French Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry , among many others.

“Football has improved a lot from a physical point of view. We used to train and it hurt to have to run with Cafú or Roberto Carlos, go around in the field... There was Cuper who warmed 4 kilometers every day. Without knowing it, I was at war against this philosophy of training. He would rather make shots, which he would later have to do in the game, than run so much. Now we have encountered a very high physical level all over the world, there are no longer the 10 classic, slow and technical ones. Today they don't have space anymore. But it is true that technically our generation was far ahead. There were more players and important characters,” he said.

“Each team had two or three who were really capable of changing a game and making history. Today we attackers are also much more protected, we injure ourselves more. I found myself in a situation of having to rebuild myself, with the qualities I had at that time. I didn't know if I could recover in the first place. In my case I had no history of such an injury, so the head is what it is. If you find something that gives you a lot of confidence and you don't have it anymore, you have to adapt to be decisive anyway. This change was hard, because in my head it was still fast, but the body didn't respond as before,” he added, referring to his case after suffering several serious injuries that put a pause to his professional career.

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