5 players we can’t believe have won more league titles than Cristiano Ronaldo since 2009
Cristiano Ronaldo boasts one of the greatest career records in the history of football, but he’s won surprisingly few league titles since he made a world-record transfer to Real Madrid way back in 2009.
The Portugal international won almost as many league titles (three Premier League titles with Manchester United) by the age of 24 than he has in the 16 years since – just four, two apiece for Real Madrid and Juventus.
Despite still regularly banging in the goals, Ronaldo is yet to win the Saudi Pro League with Al Nassr – and it looks almost certain they’ll miss out once again in 2024-25.
We’ve identified five players who have surprisingly won more league titles than the era-defining goalscorer since he signed for Real Madrid in the summer of 2009.
Luis Suarez
On the one hand, it’s not a great surprise that Suarez features here. He’s one of the greatest goalscorers of his generation and has represented some top clubs with distinction over the past decade and a half.
What is surprising is that Suarez has won twice as many league titles.
When Ronaldo signed for Madrid for a world-record fee back in the summer of 2009, Suarez was still making a name for himself in relative obscurity at an Ajax side who had struggled for silverware under the great Marco van Basten.
After scoring 49 goals in all competitions for Ajax in 2009-10, he announced himself to the world as a future superstar – and a particularly controversial one, at that – in his role in Uruguay’s run to the 2010 World Cup semi-finals.
Unbelievably, Suarez’s Ajax didn’t win the Eredivisie title that year but he did claim a winner’s medal the following year, in spite of his mid-season transfer to Liverpool.
He famously just missed out on the Premier League during his three and a half years in England, but claimed four La Liga titles in six years with Barcelona and then added a fifth after moving to Atletico Madrid. That’s three more than Ronaldo won after the same number of seasons in Spain.
In his twilight years, he’s won the Uruguayan league back at boyhood club Nacional, a regional title with Brazilian outfit Gremio and the Supporters’ Shield – given to the MLS team with the best regular season record, i.e. how we traditionally think of a league title – with Inter Miami.
For what it’s worth, Ronaldo’s long-time rival Lionel Messi has won 10 league titles – six more than Ronaldo – since the summer of 2009. Six of those came directly at Ronaldo’s expense while they were at Real Madrid and Barcelona, respectively.
Lucas Moura
There was no shortage of fairly ordinary, unglamorous players at elite clubs that racked up countless silverware – with Sergi Roberto, Stephan Lichtsteiner and Maxwell among those we considered including.
But we couldn’t look past Moura, whose iconic Champions League semi-final hat-trick against Ajax stood in stark contrast to the big meh of his five seasons with Tottenham.
Prior to his time in North London, Moura won five league titles in the French top flight with PSG. He signed for Spurs midway through 2017-18 but still claimed a winner’s medal after half a season on the periphery.
Nuno Mendes
The left-back – best in the world right now? – had only just turned seven years old when Ronaldo, now his team-mate and captain at Portugal, made that earth-shattering move to Madrid.
He’s only 22 but has five league titles to his name already, having won four Ligue 1 titles on the spin since departing Ruben Amorim’s Primeira Liga champions Sporting as a teenager back in 2021.
Mario Gotze
The German hadn’t made his professional debut until the 2009-10 campaign, when he emerged as a rising star in Jurgen Klopp’s brilliant Borussia Dortmund side, who claimed back-to-back Bundesliga titles.
He subsequently won three more at Bayern Munich, albeit without developing into one of the leading lights of that team as expected. Nine years have passed since he moved back to Dortmund, with no league titles in that time, but he still boasts more than Ronaldo since ’09.
Gotze can also claim something else that evades Ronaldo – a World Cup knockout stage goal. You know the one.
Andrea Pirlo
…that’s Pirlo, who stopped playing in Europe a decade ago and hung up his boots in 2017.
The legendary Italian midfielder has been working as a coach for the past five years – including as Ronaldo’s boss in 2020-21, when Juventus finished 4th and ended their run after nine in a row – and he still boasts more league titles since 2009 than the forward who has been playing continuously for clubs that pride themselves on challenging for league titles.
Pirlo won only a second league title with AC Milan in 2009-10 before moving to Juventus, becoming one of the architects of their 2010s era of dominance, inspiring them to the Scudetto in each of his four seasons there between 2011 and 2015.
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