I'm not debating facts. The goal record of a player is a statistic by definition. Don't pretend you're that simple just because it suits your point. That was an absolutely ridiculous response.
It's not a ridiculous response. It's fair to point out that, by their nature, goals are different than other quantifiable parameters in football, because unlike other parameters, goals are the actual unit used to decide whether games are won, drawn, or lost.
Of course, goals are influenced by things other than player quality, which adds a bunch of noise. That lowers their predictive power, and you'd want to use mathematical models to try and distinguish between the signal and the noise. But there is another thing that helps us distinguish between signal and noise, and that is having a massive fecking signal. That's the case with Ronaldo, who averaged a goal per game in league and European competition for close to a decade. When your goalscoring record is so far away from the norm, it dwarfs the noise.
Models are always going to have limitations in their ability to fit all data, and especially outliers, which Ronaldo and Messi both are. It wouldn't be in any way surprising that a statistical parameter that seeks to sort "true" player quality from all the noise might struggle when moving outside of the norm. Ronaldo is not a 19 year old someone's thinking of signing based on his xG, we are not trying to make predictions here. He already had his career, and it was enormously successful. If a parameter is telling you that during one of his most successful periods, he "didn't look too amazing compared to other world-class attacking players," it just means the model couldn't quite get him, not that is Actually Not That Good.
If it
did mean he's Actually Not That Good, then we'd have to grapple with what that even means. What does it mean that the Cristiano Ronaldo who won 3 CLs in a row and scored a lot of goals each time was deceiving us into thinking he was a great player? Am I supposed to say "damn, he got me good"? Is Florentino Perez supposed to say "never again will I allow a player to con this club into believing he's great via the dastardly method of scoring 16, 12, and 15 goals in consecutive CL editions which the club wins."? Is it
bad for a player to deceive others into thinking they're good via the method of scoring goals and winning major titles? What is the course of action to take with the knowledge that the parameter says Ronaldo was actually not that good from 2016 to 2018? Sell him in 2016? Bet against Real Madrid winning the CL in 2017 and 2018?
And no, he's not, a player that touches the ball once per game is not winning you games, even if he scores with said touch. That's such a dumb thing to say, honestly. If I gave you the choice, start with a one goal lead but a player less, would you take that?
I would have to look at the odds of conceding goals when being a man down.
But I can tell you this. If you gave me the choice of starting with a three goal lead but with a player less, I'd be more likely to take that.
If you gave me the choice of starting with a five goal lead but with a player less, I'd be even more likely to take that.
The reason is because goals matter.