Gerard Piqué confirms Lionel Messi never cared about Cristiano Ronaldo rivalry | OneFootball

Former Barcelona star Gerard Piqué has provided an insight into the feelings of Lionel Messi, regarding his long-running rivalry with Cristiano Ronaldo.

Messi and Ronaldo, of course, will go down as the two greatest players of a generation.

The pair, for the best part of 15 years, utterly dominated the European game, standing for the most part head and shoulders above any other player on the planet.

Never was the debate over their respective talents more heated than when Ronaldo was plying his trade in Spain, with the Portuguese’s stint on the books of Real Madrid having seen he and Messi line out against one another on opposite sides of the Clásico divide.

Many a fan will likely spend the coming years and even decades arguing their side of the ‘GOAT’ debate, adamant that one trait or another sets their favoured superstar apart as superior.

Cristiano Ronaldo, meanwhile, has never been shy in laying out his credentials as the best to ever lace up a pair of boots.

If the latest comments on the part of the aforementioned Gerard Piqué are anything to go by, though, it would appear that the man on the other side of the so-called ‘rivalry’ was never overly fussed by the situation.

Speaking in an interview with talkSPORT over the weekend, Piqué, a former teammate and friend of Lionel Messi, was drawn on how much importance the Argentine attached to his long-running competition with Ronaldo.

And the one-time defender went on to reveal that, as far as he could tell, not much:

“Did Messi care about Cristiano Ronaldo? No, he wasn’t that type of guy. He was very team focused, even if he was always on the front page. He was only focused on winning trophies.

“At the end of the day, because he was the best then, he was winning the Ballon d’Or. But it was not his priority.”

Conor Laird | GSFN