If you go on SofaScore right now, you will see that Cristiano Ronaldo is listed with 44 goals in the 23/24 season, when in reality he scored 50. The 6 goals from the Arab Club Champions Cup were simply “erased”. And that is where the problem starts.
For me, this is wrong. SofaScore is basically rewriting history.
The Arab Club Champions Cup is an international competition involving clubs from Muslim countries, from Africa to Asia, with dozens of teams. It is not just some random tournament. FIFA does not officially recognise the competition and, ok, on that point we have to accept it, even though I think that already starts entering a kind of monopolisation. But one thing is not counting it as an official title, and something completely different is erasing goals.
SofaScore is using a logic that is way too simplistic for something much more complex: “If FIFA counts it, we count it. If not, it does not exist.” And that makes no sense. We are talking about competitive matches, far more serious than many “official” games out there. These are not friendlies. There is context, there is competition, there is importance. This has nothing to do with goals in friendlies or with poorly documented old records, like in Pelé’s era. Here, there is data, there are matches, and there is real competition.
The bigger problem is something else: SofaScore is probably the most used app for checking results and statistics, and this could be the beginning of a dangerous trend.
We are talking about Cristiano’s race to 1000 “official” goals. Right now people still talk about him being around 967, but who guarantees that in a few years they will not start removing even more? If one major platform does this, others could follow.
Imagine he ends his career with 1000 goals and then people start “adjusting” the numbers because of bureaucratic rules. That makes no sense at all. The matches happened. They were competitive and are clearly above friendlies, but suddenly they do not count just because they do not have the “official” stamp of a single entity?
That is a weak system.
Imagine a current competition suddenly stopped being considered official, like the Conference League. Are we going to erase everything that happened there? Of course not.
Conclusion
I do not agree with SofaScore’s decision. I understand that they are following a simple criterion, but that criterion is far too limited for the reality of football. And the biggest problem is not even this case itself: it is the precedent.
If this becomes normal, other platforms will start doing the same. And that is when you really start messing with the history of the game. We are talking about possibly one of the biggest stories in football: Cristiano’s race to 1000 goals.
Erasing parts of that because of pure bureaucracy makes no sense at all.