Ok, well, I don’t really hate them. I don’t think you can be a real football fan if you hate them. For example, some aspects of Ronaldo’s character do get on my nerves from time to time, but I can’t stay ignorant of the fact that the dude is a footballer of a historic caliber, and I feel really grateful that I had the opportunity to follow his whole career.
But still, having said that, I do hate them in a way. Or actually, I hate their truly mind-fucking goalscoring numbers, which really changed the way we look at other players, past and present.
One of the many fetishes that I have is browsing through Wikipedia and looking at the statistics of different footballers. Wiki is a truly great site, and it has much stats-related information. I love looking at the tables with all the appearances and goalscoring data, and in several cases they also have assists data. Unfortunately, in Messi’s case – they don’t :-(.