Among the best, and certainly most imaginative, football books published in the last two years is Tore Wie Gemalt (Goals As Portraits), put together over many years by the German journalist Javier Caceres.
Through his varied career, Caceres has carried around a moleskin notebook and would ask his various interviewees or contacts to pause for a moment to draw on one its pages a favourite goal they had scored, while talking him through how it happened.
The compilation is revealing: Pep Guardiola sketching out a goal he scored for Barcelona decades earlier but recalling it in careful detail, noting the precise positions of other players, teammates and opponents.
Roberto Carlos, the Brazilian with the magical left foot, describing the boomerang curl he famously put on a free-kick in a 1997 match against France with a dramatic sweep of the pen - but also while meticulously drawing the advertising hoarding, to the right of the frame of the goal he had aimed at, because he calculated that if he set his eyes there, his shot would swing back to sneak inside the post.
Then there’s Pele, to whom Caceres spoke several years before the Brazilian’s death in 2022. He took care over his drawing, ensuring it had a neat line of tufts of grass to represent the pitch and mesh to show the goal net. But in the space of the goalmouth Pele drew neither a shot nor any player. He simply wrote a number: 1,282. Handing his drawing back to Caceres, he smiled: “All my goals were important.”
Pele’s precise number of career goals has sometimes been disputed, but only to a small degree. And the era he played in, from the 1950s to the late 1970s, means that there is no televised record - let alone drawings - of many of them and a far less rigid calendar than today's competitions to assign all of them to. Some goals registered in club friendlies or exhibition games swell his astonishing total.
They may also make Pele's total of elite-level goals forever unmatchable. Yet for one modern great, Cristiano Ronaldo, the breathtaking possibility of 1,000 career goals, with 21st century TV footage available for each one, is creeping - or rather hurtling - into view.
And for those inclined to question whether the more recent rush of CR7 goals are as important as the 450 he scored for Real Madrid, the 145 Manchester United or the 101 he crammed into his time with Juventus, there’s a significant context.
At the weekend, Ronaldo struck his 106th goal in the jersey of Al Nassr, bringing him to a combined 950 goals in senior football for his clubs and for Portugal, for whom he has racked up 143 international goals.
Three days later, in the quarter-final of the King’s Cup, he experienced that relative rarity - 90 minutes on the pitch without a goal - but the less rare phenomenon of his four years in Saudi Arabia, the feeling of a trophy slipping from his grasp. Al Nassr lost 2-1 to league champions Al Ittihad and so their prospects of silverware this season diminished.
What Ronaldo has learnt, in nearly four years in Riyadh is that, while global evaluations of the standard of Saudi club football tend to vary, his own assessment, that the Pro League can be ranked within the top five domestic leagues of Europe - “better than [France’s] Ligue 1, obviously”, he has said, more than once - is backed up by some evidence.
The top bracket of the Saudi Pro League is highly competitive, in that nobody can monopolise titles. Al Nassr may lead the table at this early stage of the 2025-26 season but in the Ronaldo era they have been obliged to watch Al Hilal and Al Ittihad claim the league title and see Al Ahli carry off the last AFC Champions League.
That Al Nassr trophy drought is a motivation for the sport’s most enduringly motivated superstar to keep on scoring, and forbidding advanced age to act as any sort of impediment to his goalscoring milestones.
Ronaldo celebrated his 40th birthday in February, and since then, in 33 matches for club and country, he has added 27 goals to his vast collection.
His SPL output this season runs at an average of exactly a goal per game. Keep that up for the remaining 28 matchdays - or up his ratio, as Ronaldo did in netting 35 times in 31 Pro League matches in 2023-24 - and goal No 1,000 starts to loom into view well before he turns 42.
After all, there’s a World Cup to look forward to with Portugal, who, assuming they consolidate their top place in their qualifying group next month, would be expected to go deep into the knockout phase in the Americas next summer.
Ronaldo can anticipate up to 12 international fixtures between now and the third week of July. And there will be opportunities with Al Nassr in the AFC Champions League Two.
And if there’s a glance in the rear-view mirror at Lionel Messi, with whom Ronaldo has vied for so long in breaking records at the summit of his sport, the duel remains relevant.
Messi, in his second full year with Inter Miami in the United States, is displaying the sort of appetite for goals that characterised his heyday seasons at Barcelona.
In 2025, 38-year-old Messi has scored 29 times in 28 matches in MLS, a league whose standards might not reach those of, say France’s Ligue 1, but are generally climbing.
It’s been a strong season, too, for the most renowned finishers of the generations who followed in the slipstream of Ronaldo and Messi.
The race for the Golden Shoe, awarded to the most prolific scorer in league football in Europe - with the value of goals adjusted for the level of the competition they are scored in - is quickly distilling into a three-way contest between footballers accustomed to staying the course in these sorts of jousts.
Harry Kane has a dozen goals already from eight Bundesliga outings for Bayern Munich; Erling Haaland, of Premier League Manchester City, and Kylian Mbappe, of La Liga’s Real Madrid, are on 11 each, from nine and ten matches respectively.
Those last two, at 25 and 26 years old, might dream of reaching 1,000 one day. Ronaldo is in the home straight to that landmark.
