Messi versus Ronaldo: A Philosophical View

29^th August, 2017

By: Amir Abdulazeez

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here is one thing apiece that Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi sympathizers are finding it difficult to contend with. There is also one other thing that the two of them cannot settle on. These are among the many reasons why the debate between who is the best player between them keeps getting controversial by the day.

Cristiano Ronaldo fans cannot believe that despite his out of the world, mind blowing performances over the last 10 years, there was still someone considered by many (other than those in their category) to be better than him and perhaps rightly so. Lionel Messi fans cannot believe that his super human and breath taking performances over the last 10 years, has not given him the absolute monopoly of global attention. That someone else is sharing the accolades and honours with him and apparently even threatening to have a larger share of them is what they can’t simply fathoms.

The other thing that both Messi and Ronaldo followers won’t understand is that, rating one above the other doesn’t take anything away from the other’s greatness. Neither of them needs to be superior or inferior to any other player for him to cement a unique place for himself in the history of football. One more contentious issue is that neither Messi nor Ronaldo may be objectively considered as the greatest player of all time; although that debate would be better fruitful when they retire.

The modern football world’s obsession with Ronaldo and Messi seems to have affected many followers’ sense of memory and history. It may be possible that more than 70% of present day football followers were not born or old enough to follow football before 1990. For this category, who is the majority, no any other player in history was as good as Ronaldo and Messi, let alone surpasses them. Those who actually know what football was in the 1950s to 1980s may or may not be up to 10% and their voices are not often heard these days. Some 20% may not be that old, but they have enough knowledge of history, the problem is that we don’t often listen to them when they speak.

Except some miracle is going to happen in the remaining few years of Messi-Ronaldo careers, Pele will still remain the greatest football player of all time and only core Messi-Ronaldo fanatics and some few others will dispute that. Whatever scale one is going to use, it would be nearly impossible not to rate Pele above anyone else. From skills to statistics down to achievements, it’s all there. His over 750 official goals in just about 800 matches and his three world cup (the greatest football competition) among others will testify to that.

What of Maradona who single-handedly won the World Cup for Argentina in 1986? Well, Pele-Messi-Ronaldo individual and team achievements as well as their consistency over a long period plus their statistics are too irresistible to place him above any of them; this is debatable though. His on and off the pitch controversies, and injuries also tend to work against him when it comes to discourses like this.

That this piece is intended to be more hypothetical than analytical means emphasis will not be laid on dishing out statistics of these players which it is assumed the reader is fairly conversant with. That it is intended to be as short as possible also means that long arguments will not be employed.

The player who is very closely behind Pele among the all-time greats would arguably be Lionel Messi. There is probably no objective person who would watch Messi for a year and comfortably rate any other person other than Pele equal or above him. Does that make Cristiano Ronaldo and some of the best players over the last 40 years inferior? Certainly no. as far as there is competition, there must be some ranking.

How exactly everyone ranks and at what magnitude is one better than the other may be the only difficult thing to categorically determine. For example if Pele is top among all-time greats and Cristiano is second, it doesn’t mean that the Brazilian is three times better than the Portuguese.  Likewise Zidane may be just some inches away from Messi in terms of greatness but still rank 5^th, 6^th or even lower.

Determining what constitutes greatness in itself is something very controversial. Is it by rating everyone base on what he is good at? If that’s so then why are many defenders and goalkeepers conspicuously missing among the all-time greats?  Is it someone with the best statistics? Then where will the likes of Zidane and Ronaldinho end in such ranking? Is it the number of trophies? Then we will be talking of only the likes of Dani Alves. Is it the individual honours? Then what happens to players who played when many awards were not even in existence. Is it the immensity of followership and support? Then no one can be better than Cristiano and David Beckham. Is it by the amount of individual influence on the team? Then let’s talk of only Maradona and the likes of Michel Platini and Alfredo Di Stefano. Is it by rating everyone base on the opportunities and circumstances he found himself? Then may God help the likes of Eusebio.

However, despite all these impediments, there must be some ranking governed by many factors that balance each other as well as with some rationality and objectivity.

Cristiano Ronaldo will most likely settle as the 3^rd all-time greatest player. However, over the reaming 3 to 5 years of his career and with a world cup coming in June 2018, he still have a say on whether Messi is good enough for second place or even Pele in first place and we all know what Ronaldo can do in a year, not to talk of 3 to 5 years. If that isn’t achieved, he’ll have the chance to consolidate his place and move clear of competition from the likes of Maradona, Platini, Zidane, Beckenbauer, Ronaldo Nazario, Johan Cruyff and a host of others.

Now let’s see if there is any other way Cristiano can rank above Messi or even Pele among the all-time greats. Yes that may happen if we decide to disaggregate greatness and approach it from different sub-categories. For instance, little will doubt that Cristiano Ronaldo is the most complete footballer of all time and the most successful European footballer ever. He’ll also be, alongside Gerd Muller, among the greatest goal scorers. With his 50 goals plus in 6 consecutive seasons and 25 plus in 10, he is perhaps the most consistent player ever. He is the most famous and supported footballer by far, also among the most decorated and the finest Portuguese player. He is the best player of the greatest club team in history. In fact, there is possibly no category of football greatness that Ronaldo would not become 1^st, 2^nd or 3^rd.

In Messi’s case, he may rank worse than 3^rd in many critical categories. For instance, in terms of completeness, he’ll be nowhere near the top 5; and even if he wins the world cup, Maradona may still be seen by the majority as the finest player in Argentine colours. Repeated failures in the South American continental competition and spending virtually his whole career out of the continent may see him rank below expectation among the all-time South American greats. However, he is among the greatest if not the greatest dribblers, playmakers and brilliant players of all time. His technique, decision-making and vision is incomparable.

If at the end of Messi-Ronaldo retirement, Pele still remains the greatest footballer, then he will have the latter to thank. Ronaldo has successfully put a clog in Messi’s bold wheel of attempting to become bigger than football itself. Ronaldo’s statistics are what most significantly makes his play great, but Messi’s stats appear to be only a by-product of his mesmerizing play. Messi does with little or no effort what Ronaldo sweats and labours to do. However, both players have shown us that there’s more than one key to any door and the most important is to use the key at your disposal to open it.

We can make a case for Ronaldo that football has not presented him with equal opportunities it presented Messi but at the end of it all, only few will give this view any significance. After all there is considerable amount of luck and external factors involved in any greatness. Besides, Ronaldo himself got more than a fair share of opportunities which thousands of other players will claim can do better if they had same.

Players like Ronaldo and Messi will be very difficultto have successors. While it is more possible with the case of Messi since there is no limit to what nature can give you as the cases of Pele, Maradona and Brazilian Ronaldo can testify, it is nearly impossible to become a Portuguese Ronaldo. There is limit to what hard work can give, but not when you are a Cristiano Ronaldo.

After all have been said and done, Messi’s post–retirement achievement will be by his natural master class; Ronaldo’s, by what he has forced out of himself to challenge nature, plus how he has prevented Messi from making everyone else look like a fool.

Amir has supported Real Madrid for close to 20 years

The Other Issues ASUU is Ignoring

17^th August, 2017

By: Amir Abdulazeez

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ast year around October, the Senate passed a bill seeking to stop sexual abuse of female students in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions. The bill, titled: “Sexual Harassment in Tertiary Education Institution Prohibition Bill, 2016” sponsored by Senator Ovie Omo-Agege, prescribed a 5-year jail term for lecturers and educators convicted of sexual harassment of their male or female students. The bill also recommended expulsion or suspension for students whose claims of being serially abused by lecturers or educators are found to be false by any competent court. In the alternative, the bill also proposed a fine of N5 million in the event that the accused person is convicted by a competent court of law even as it made provisions for lecturers and educators who may be falsely accused by their students to seek redress.

Now, that a condition overwhelmingly exists which warrants the passage of a bill like this one is very disgraceful not only to the Nigerian academia, but to the Nigerian morality in general. But, the worst part of it is that the bill may never be able to address the smallest fraction of indecency and sex abuse going on in our tertiary institutions. In fact, students-teachers sex relationship driven by both silent and open threat is gradually and subconsciously becoming normal and legal in our universities. 

The general reactions from the Nigerian academia when this bill was passed were at best silence, and at worst condemnation towards the bill and its sponsors. At the moment, there is hardly any place dirtier than Nigerian universities and other tertiary institutions when it comes to sex scandals. Our institutions have been turned into hallmarks of prostitution and sexual harassment. The integrity of the system has been eroded to the extent that even its topmost hierarchy is guilty of this. These are some of the issues you seldom or never hear ASUU vigorously fighting to correct. The very system the union is seeking external intervention to correct infrastructural-wise is already internally rotten moral-wise. Again, ASUU is on strike for the same old but many reasons, but the moral degradation imposed by some of its members on the system isn’t one of them.

“Our members across the country were getting increasingly frustrated, distracted and disenchanted” were the reported words of the National President of ASUU, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi when declaring the just commenced nationwide strike. While briefing journalists, Ogunyemi listed ASUU’s outstanding issues with the Federal Government to include; payment of fractions/non-payment of salaries; non-payment of earned academic allowances, non-releases of operational license of NUPEMCO; non implementation of the provisions of the 2014 pension reform act with respect to retired professors and their salaries, removal of universities staff schools from funding by government and funds for the revitalization of public universities among others.

Problems like moral degradation of the system, internal socio-administrative corruption bedeviling universities, many lecturers’ nonchalant attitude towards their jobs, inadequate or non-existent monitoring and evaluation of lecturers’ performance mechanism, unethical academic practices, nepotism and favouritism in employment are not among the major problems ASUU is concerned with. These are problems caused and promoted by lecturers, many of whom are also ASUU members as well as by university administrators who once were or still are. The union must make efforts within its control to see that we first have a cleansed system, before we can talk of improving it.

As is common with many government agencies, universities are now some of the most visible symbols of financial corruption and mismanagement. The little scarce resources sent to the universities from the government are not well managed by the university administrators from top to bottom. It is very common these days to hear of vice chancellors, bursars and other university principal officers standing trial for corruption cases. Stories of lecturers collecting bribes from students and their parents to award marks are also heard everywhere. The union must emphasize on internal honesty, transparency and accountability which is largely lacking. Senior academic staff are imposing their incompetent sons, daughters and cronies as lecturers into the system and the trend is continuing at an alarming rate.

ASUU should also be concerned with how many universities are hiding under the excuse of inadequate funding from the government to introduce aggressive and in many cases, easy, dubious and exploitative revenue generation methods with little or nothing to show for it. Some of these methods tend to portray the universities as revenue generation agencies rather than institutions of learning. In a bid to bridge the wide funding gap, many Nigerian universities have resorted to charging exorbitant and in some cases ridiculous application, processing and registration fees for their undergraduate and more significantly post-graduate programmes. Such exorbitant fees are been hiked regularly with any slight opportunity. In some universities, students are forced to pay high sums for the use of facilities which are built and maintained by public money. With these sorts of easy, unearned and exploitative revenue generation policies, many Nigerian universities are tilting towards commercialization.

ASUU should be concerned with the quantity of our universities. The number of federal, state and private universities operating in Nigeria and registered by the Nigerian Universities Commission stands at about 135 which rose from 51 in 2005. While ASUU members are busy taking advantage of the large number of universities to serve as visiting lecturers, the union itself appears to be indifferent to this. The union still wants efficiency and at the same time it doesn’t discourage its members from picking up visiting appointments in 2 to 3 other places apart from their primary places of work thereby largely neglecting their primary universities and underperforming in their visiting ones. The union should discourage state governments from flouting political universities and the Federal Government against issuing licenses to many of the private universities largely considered incompetent.

Isn’t ASUU worried that in a university system boasting of more than 2500 living professors, academicians are still hiding under the guise of inadequate government sponsorship for their failure to produce any ground breaking research of the Nobel-prize nomination grade over the last 30 years? With the decent amount of external and non-governmental research funding coming into the Nigerian university system plus the little government intervention, how much have we even came close to achieving that?

Granted that all ASUU demands deserved to be looked into and we must put substantial part of the blame on the Federal Government for the stagnation of our education system, but in all honesty and sincerity, how much have Nigerian universities themselves able to achieve, initiate and innovate to compellingly motivate government enough to invest more? How much of a potential have they shown to attract private and corporate national and international organizations to invest in them?  How much value has our academia independently added to our society? Do we really think that the strongest universities in the world were actually made what they are by their governments?

Nigerian academic researches conducted by some ASUU members are dominated by plagiarism and other violations of ethical and professional considerations. The union will do a great job if tries to address many of issues like this. 

ASUU have been seeking a rise in education quality from without more than it is seeking it from within. Isn’t the union aware of how recruitment of lecturers has now been dominated by nepotism and favouritism? While this has resulted to the system becoming replete with incompetent hands, how much has the union tried to stop university administrators from doing this? How is the union working towards mounting a mechanism that will expose the incompetent members among its ranks who are the main drivers of poor quality education in the country due to their poor teaching?

Our primary and secondary education systems are more than rotten; they are ten times worse than our tertiary education system. If ASUU’s objective is quality of education, it must also be concerned with this as there will be no proper tertiary education without a solid foundation from the bottom.

ASUU should also be concerned with how many of its former members opportune to serve in government in various positions and at various times have largely failed to make a significant impact either on the education sector in particular or the general progress of the country in general. Lest we forget, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan and Professor Yemi Osinbajo are former ASUU members.

Twitter: @AmirAbdulazeez