Technology ends the Messi-Cristiano debate

The debate on football is almost endless. Each one usually defends the figure of his club or who best suits him. Sometimes with numbers, sometimes with titles, with arguments such as 'charisma', leadership or that final in which one overturned the hegemony of another.

The one of Messi and Cristiano to see who is number one is the most heated in recent years reaching from the bars to the highest spheres, in which the votes decided each season for who the Ballon d'Or was. Something that tried to finish it and it was one more argument for debate.

From the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) together with the Dutch data company, SciSports, they have bet on science and the use of technology to develop an algorithm that places objective data on one of the top two, betting on the 'Big data', a large-scale data study method that has already been successfully applied to sport for years.

In Sporza they explain the model that analyzes all the actions of the game and generates a final value that is the Value of Actions by Probability Estimation and measures how all the actions of the player end up determining the final result of a match.

The computer department of this university that has carried out the research has compiled all the data from 13-14 to 17-18 in LaLiga and places Messi ahead of Cristiano with a VAEP value of 1.21 for a 0.61 of Cristiano Ronaldo.

They explain that the result is because Cristiano plays less with the ball but that it has a great impact and that Messi generates more actions but also, all, with a high value. Although the data is there, it seems that the debate will continue.