Cristiano Ronaldo: How good are Al-Nassr and the Saudi Pro League? | OneFootball

Cristiano Ronaldo will play his first match in Saudi Arabia on Thursday against Lionel Messi’s Paris Saint-Germain.

It won’t quite be a debut for his new club, Al-Nassr, but instead, he will represent an XI made up of the two clubs in Riyadh – Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal.

The Portuguese superstar is set to wear the captain’s armband in the showpiece exhibition.

But we’ll have to wait until Sunday to see Ronaldo’s official debut for Al-Nassr as they face Al-Ettifaq in the Saudi Pro League.

Only then will we get an idea of the standard Ronaldo will be playing following his move to Saudi Arabia.

However, even before he’s stepped foot on the pitch, a report from The Athletic has revealed what Ronaldo can expect.

How good are Ronaldo’s new club, Al-Nassr?

Using data from sports intelligence agency, Twenty First Group, the report claims that Ronaldo’s new club, Al-Nassr, is the 308th-best team in the world. That puts them alongside the likes of Championship sides Luton and Sunderland in the data.

In comparison, Manchester United are deemed to be the 17th-best team in the world.

From the 17th best team in the world to the 308th…

How good is the Saudi Pro League?

The Saudi League itself is rated as the 58th highest-quality league in the world according to the strength of its average team. That puts it below the Scottish Premiership (49th), but above Serie C (68th) in Italy.

The worst teams in the Saudi league are around 3,000th in the world. That’s the same level as mid-table National League clubs such as FC Halifax Town and Boreham Wood. The average side Ronaldo will be competing against is on a par with weak League One teams or good League Two sides.

‘Al-Nassr aren’t that bad’

“Within any given league and country, it is relatively easy to work out who the good and bad teams are,” Omar Chaudhuri, chief intelligence officer at Twenty First Group, said. “You have results on the pitch, you see how teams do when they get promoted and relegated and how they do in domestic cups. You can account for the strength of line-ups and that type of thing.

“It gets tricky when you go cross-continent because the teams don’t play each other that much, although we do have the Club World Cup which gives us an indication of the relative quality of South America, Asia and so on.

“Relatively speaking, Al Nassr are not that bad, but there is a big drop-off once you start getting outside the top 15 or 20 teams. By the time you get to 308th, you have got Championship-level teams.”

What is the best league in the world?

“The Premier League is the highest quality league because when we take the average ranking and rating of the teams in that league, it comes out higher than the Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and so on,” said Chaudhuri.

How many goals will Ronaldo score in Saudi Arabia?

Twenty First Group data can also attempt to predict the impact Ronaldo will have at Al-Nassr in terms of goalscoring.

“We can see how players perform when they go across leagues,” said Chaudhuri. “We can see, for example, when strikers move from Asia to Europe that gives us a sense of relative standards in quality and we can see their goalscoring rates increase or decrease.

“Our exchange rates model allows us to understand how much a goal in one league is worth in another,” said Chaudhuri. “This model estimates that a Premier League goal is worth around 2.6 goals in the Saudi Pro League.

“Based on the ‘exchange rate’, this equates to around 1.28 goals per 90, or around 21 goals if he were to play most of the minutes for Al Nassr between now and the end of the season — before any penalties he will inevitably take.”

That means Ronaldo is predicted to score 21 goals – plus any penalties – in Al-Nassr’s remaining 17 league matches.

When he’s playing against teams that a similar to the quality of Halifax and Boreham Wood, we wouldn’t be surprised if he exceeds that number…

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(The Football Terrace)