900 Goals for Cristiano Ronaldo But Is He The First? Here's 5 Players Said to Have Beaten Him to The Milestone

He came, he saw, he conquered. There was no doubting Cristiano Ronaldo, as the Portuguese swooped into the penalty box to get to the end of Nuno Gomes’ cross and volley it in for his 900th career goal.

With his goal, Ronaldo became the first-ever men’s player to reach the historied milestone in official matches, beating his rival Lionel Messi to it, as he now looks on to reach the seemingly unattainable 1000-goal mark next.

“After (900), my challenge is to be at 1,000 goals. The one difference I want is that I want all 1000 goals on video, so I can prove that I have achieved the feat,” joked Ronaldo with his former Man United teammate Rio Ferdinand on his YouTube channel earlier.

“If you want all my goals, I can bring videos from my training too!”

Why does Ronaldo state the same? Well, according to other reports and recordings, he may not be the first to reach the same milestone.

Now, the waters get murky here, but bear with me. Ronaldo is NOT the first player ever to reach the 900-goal mark. He is the first one to do so with official goals, but the honour of being the top goalscorer of all-time goes to Brazilian legend Pele himself.

Here’s how that works.

Each player’s goal tally is chronicled by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS), which acts as soccer’s global record-keeper. They include only competitive fixtures for recognised teams and national sides in their database but Pele, along with many others, have scored many more goals across their entire career.

Including friendlies and touring games, Pele holds the Guinness World Record for Most Career Goals. He is credited with 1,279 goals in 1,363 games, including a frankly absurd 126 in the year 1959.

Now, what makes this whole sage interesting is that, if one goes by even more obscure recordings, it has been claimed that another Brazilian, Artur Friedenreich, scored 1,329 goals between 1909 and 1935. However these games were often undocumented and only 354 are recognised by the IFFHS.

In an even more confusing twist of the tale, Ronaldo’s record gets diminished further when one takes into the account the statistics used by another organisation called RSSSF.

As the RSSSF uses different methodology from that of the IFFHS and other media outlets to determine which goals to include, the list of top goalscorers gets even more murky.

According to the RSSSF records, there exists three more players who have reached the 900+ goal tally before Ronaldo: German Erwin Helmchen with a reported 989+ goals, Austrian/Czech Josef Bican with 950+ goals, and England’s Ronnie Rooke with 934+ goals.

But, at the end of the day, it is the official count that matters, and when it boils down to the same, Ronaldo reigns supreme.

To set all confusion aside, here are all the top 10 official highest goal-scorers of all time in men’s football history:

Ronaldo, who has already taken the thone as the top goalscorer of all time, is not done yet, as he eyes a staggering 1000 official goals before the end of his career.

The former Manchester United, Real Madrid forward also holds the record for the most international goals, having scored 131 goals in his 209 appearances for Portugal.