Juventus forward Cristiano Ronaldo is Serie A’s leading goal-scorer so far this season, but it’s not just the goals that deserve high praise.
It’s hard to think of a single player whom a team relies on more than Cristiano Ronaldo at Juventus. The Portuguese superstar has scored 12 goals in the 2020-2021 Serie A season thus far in 10 total appearances, with nine of those being starts. He is the league’s leading goal-scorer and the only player with more goals than appearances.
Ronaldo is doing all of this on a Juventus side that does not have a single one of the league’s seven players with two key passes per game, according to WhoScored.com. Alvaro Morata, Federico Chiesa, and Juan Cuadrado are all doing a good job of providing assists, mostly via crosses or short passes, but it’s no secret that the Bianconeri lack true creativity in the middle of the park. Many of their best midfield combinations lack this trait.
Yet Ronaldo hasn’t stopped scoring. He’s had only one bad game all season long, which was against Atalanta when he, gasp, missed a penalty and a couple of other good chances. But otherwise, Ronaldo has been as sharp as ever. He and Real Madrid’s Luka Modric are two 35-year-olds who are proving that age is nothing but a number for the absolute best players on this planet.
That is the level Cristiano Ronaldo remains at, and it is obvious to anyone watching Serie A that he is the league’s best player. Last season, he lost out on the official MVP award to teammate Paulo Dybala. He even missed out on the Capocannoniere trophy, which Lazio’s Ciro Immobile won. But, this year, he has no peer. Not even fellow ageless wonder Zlatan Ibrahimovic nor the brilliant Romelu Lukaku can match what Ronaldo is doing.
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Even when Juventus were embarrassed by Fiorentina in their final match of 2020, Ronaldo gave it his all. He would not go down without a fight in what was otherwise an atrocious performance from his team, leading the way with eight dribbles completed and three key passes.
In fact, out of the 16 players in Serie A with more than five goals this season, Ronaldo is the leader with 1.7 dribbles completed per game. He also has more key passes per game, 1.1, than the other players in the top five in goals scored.
Ronaldo is not a creator, and he is not the menace on the ball he was in his youth. But he does not need to be either of those things, except on occasion.
Juventus simply need Ronaldo to be a goal-scoring machine and a team leader up front, because who else will fulfill those roles? They already have Dybala as the magician, Morata as the all-around link-up man, Cuadrado and Chiesa as the crossers, Dejan Kulusevski as the secondary scorer, and a cadre of midfielders ready to do the dirty work for the club.
So far in 2020-2021, Ronaldo has fulfilled his obligations to the team perfectly, and he has done so with such aplomb that there is no real discussion. He is Serie A’s best player by some distance, and after worries of possible signs of decline in 2018-2019, the No. 7 is reminding football fans why he still has his place among the world’s top three players.