I'm sorry but without Ronnie, we're not winning the CL or most of those league titles. He was unstoppable in England.
The season after the one you sold Ronnie you won the league and got to a UCL final anyway. We've yet to see how big of a donwfall for Barcelona Messi leaving us will be, time will tell.
Do you have any evidence for this?
Numbers in football can be deceiving but when it comes to direct freekicks I think they're very relevant. From 2009/10 to 2016/17, Ronaldo's scored 19 goals out of 292 freekicks and Messi's scored 18 out of 232 freekicks in La Liga. In the CL, Ronaldo's scored 10 out of 105 and Messi 2 out of 64 in the CL.
Ronaldo - 29 out of 397 (7.3%)
Messi - 20 out of 296 (6.7%)
Messi's scored 3 or 4 this season I think so that should be closer now, but Ronaldo takes a bigger volume since he shoots from further out. The only reason people think Messi's easily better at freekicks is because he gets close to scoring more often since he places his shots rather than shooting with power.
You usually bash on stats like "conversion rate" when people use them to put Messi above Ronaldo as a goalscorer, now you're going to use that to talk about who's a better FK shooter?
People think Leo is better because 1) Recency bias (the same thing that's igniting the GOAT debate, after everyone thought it was done 3 years ago), 2) The amount of great FK's he gets saved by the keeper or hit the post (and if you think that doesn't count, then the next time someone like William hits the post twice against us there's no reason to say we were "lucky", a miss should be a miss for Messi in a FK or for William in open play in your opinion) and 3) Because to top recency bias, his biggest feats from FK have been done lately, like scoring 9 in 2016, twice in a final or 3 league fixtures in a row.
They score at the same rate as eachother so why would you pick Messi?
Because they score at the same rate career-wise, but lately, Leo is miles better than Ronaldo at free kicks.
Like in any argument, when you choose what player you'd want recent form and peak form are important too, the same way everytime someone brings up their career goals/game ratio you are quick to point out that Ronaldo took longer to develop into a goalscorer, people are free to assume Leo is better than Cris at free kicks even if it took him longer to be better at it, as you yourself said
numbers can be deceiving