Juventus: Cristiano Ronaldo is still the king of the clutch

Juventus forward Cristiano Ronaldo is known for having ice in his veins, and he continues to come up big in the clutch for the Bianconeri.

If it weren’t for Cristiano Ronaldo, Juventus would have been handed their first loss of the season in their second match of 2020-2021. But Ronaldo bailed out Juve at the Stadio Olimpico against Roma, scoring first from the spot and then from a trademark, air-hanging header.

Ronaldo’s headed effort came in the final 15 minutes of the match, meaning the free-scoring forward has needed just two games to come up with a clutch goal for Juventus.

But that shouldn’t come as a surprise to fans of the Old Lady or anyone who has followed Ronaldo for a few years. The myth is that he goes from “legendary” to “impossible” when it becomes time for him to seize the moment, and there are statistics that lend credence to this tale.

I decided to go to WhoScored.com and look up how frequently Cristiano Ronaldo has scored in the final 15 minutes of the match for Juventus.

Juventus star Cristiano Ronaldo scored six goals in the final 15 minutes last season

Last season in 2019-2020, Ronaldo scored six out of his 31 goals in the final 15 minutes of the match. Since the final 15 minutes of the match are one-sixth of the game’s total duration, that would mean Ronaldo would have scored 36 goals in a season if every game were played in the clutch. (He scored 31 last year, second behind Ciro Immobile.) The problem with that logic, though, is that goals aren’t always spread evenly among these six rather arbitrary divisions of the match.

So where did he rank among Serie A players in the final 15? Ronaldo was third behind super-sub Luis Muriel (7) and Immobile (10).

If we go look at the 2018-2019 season, Ronaldo also scored six goals in the final 15 minutes of the match. And once again, he came up among the league’s leaders in clutch goals. This time, only Napoli hero Dries Mertens had more goals in the final 15, scoring seven times. Considering Ronaldo scored fewer goals in his first season in Serie A, he had a higher proportion of goals scored in the last 15.

There is one last caveat we must make with Ronaldo’s clutch statistics. Juventus are the best team in the league, so they are more likely than any other club to have the game in-hand in the final 15 minutes of the match. They are not as desperate to score goals, especially not as driven to score as, say, Atalanta if they bring on Muriel off the bench.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s clutch numbers at Real Madrid were even more impressive

So when we talk a little bit more about the context, Ronaldo’s clutch goal-scoring becomes just a little bit more impressive. Even if we add the age-old caveat about penalty goals and Ronaldo, that caveat is dulled by the simple concession that scoring penalties late is as high-pressured as it gets. And that only lends more credence to Ronaldo’s clutchness.

Of course, Ronaldo’s best late-game statistics were at Real Madrid, where he scored more goals overall when in the prime of his career. On two occasions, Ronaldo scored more than 10 goals in the final 15 minutes throughout the season, including a jaw-dropping 15 goals in 2014-2015 when he had a career-high 48 goals in La Liga. That means nearly one-third of Ronaldo’s goals came in the final one-sixth of the match, which would then be extrapolated to a staggering 90 goals in a season.

Discussions about players in the clutch tend to happen more in basketball than football, and legendary players like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant seemed to somehow raise their standards even higher at the end of matches. It seems like Ronaldo is, once again, very similar to legends in other sports in this regard. And at 35 years old, he is still going strong in the final moments of the match.