[OC] Active Stars vs Legendary Players – cumulative goals by age (Reviewed)

Reviewed the chart from the previous post comments!

Every line is cumulative career goals plotted against the player's age, not the calendar year, so you can see who was ahead of whom at the same point in their life, not just who finished higher.

The 11 colored lines are the players I wanted to follow: today's active scorers (Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé, Haaland, Salah, Kane, Lautaro, Vinícius Jr, Neymar) alongside Lewandowski and Suárez.

The grey band is the field of 15 other all-time greats: Pelé, Puskás, Romário, Gerd Müller, Ronaldo Nazário, Bican and more. Instead of drawing 15 more spaghetti lines, it shows their median (dashed) and 25th–75th percentile range at every age, recomputed from whichever of them had reached that age. So the band is the "greatness envelope" you'd expect a historic scorer to fall inside.

Counting basis: official matches only, club official competitions + all senior internationals (including friendly caps). Unofficial club friendlies and exhibition tours are excluded, which is why Pelé shows 757 rather than his often-quoted ~1,324 all-match figure.

A few things I found interesting:

• Messi and Ronaldo don't just finish high, they spend almost their entire careers riding the top edge of the historic band or above it.
• Mbappé and Haaland are tracking at or above the legends' median for their age, but they're still young, the band ahead of them is where the all-time greats kept climbing.
• The active players' lines end on their last completed season (mid-2026 snapshot), so a line stopping short just means that player hasn't finished 2025–26 yet, not that they've slowed down.