Predicting the exact game in which Cristiano Ronaldo will reach his 1000th goal milestone

Cristiano Ronaldo is now just 21 goals away from reaching 1,000 goals, the landmark he has openly targeted as the defining achievement of the final years of his career. But when will he get there?

At 41, the question is no longer whether Ronaldo can reach the four-figure mark. It is how long it will take him to get there.

The Portugal captain remains prolific for Al-Nassr, while his international career is entering its final chapter. But Ronaldo’s scoring rate has fluctuated considerably in recent months, and he’s finally opened up about the possibility of retiring.

We’ve crunched the numbers and mapped out the various scenarios.

“I want to reach 1,000 goals,” Ronaldo said, unveiling his last major career ambition on Rio Ferdinand’s YouTube channel just over two years ago.

“If I don’t have any injuries, this for me is the most important [thing], I want that. For me, the best mark that I can have in football is to reach, first, 900 goals. After, my challenge is to be at 1,000 goals.”

“All the goals I have scored, they have video. They all have video. Listen, I respect all of them [Pele and Di Stefano]. And if you want more goals, I can bring them from training, too. And I will prove to the people after. They prefer this player, or this is the best one. I don’t care about that.”

Ronaldo has maintained the importance of that ambition, and reiterated that desire as a major goal, alongside winning a third Nations League title with Portugal.

“Both aims are important,” he said.

“One thousand goals, yes, and the national team. Winning the Nations League, the competition starts tomorrow [Thursday], it’s a new age.”

With all that in mind, here’s our calculations for when Ronaldo could potentially reach the milestone of 1000 goals in his professional career.

– Barring any major career-ending injuries, Ronaldo will almost certainly reach the milestone of a thousand goals at some point in 2027. Probably in the spring.

– It’s possible that if Ronaldo enjoys a resurgence and goes on a hot streak akin to his most prolific peak at Real Madrid, he could do it before the end of the year, but that doesn’t appear likely.

– If you take his current rate of scoring (21 goals in his last 34 appearances, coinciding almost entirely with the calendar year of 2026) as what he’ll likely maintain, another 34 appearances (eight with Portugal over the next three international breaks, 26 with Al Nassr) takes us through to early April 2027.

– Of course, that’s assuming that Ronaldo keeps up the roughly 0.6 goals per game ratio that he’s kept up so far in 2026.

– There is an argument that Ronaldo could be set to improve upon that scoring rate. He’s been written off on the international stage after poor showings in the last two major summer tournaments, but he scored eight goals in nine games in the 2024-25 Nations League and a further five goals in qualifying for the 2026 World Cup. Rediscover his form for Portugal, up his rate to around 1.00 goals per game, and fill his boots in the Saudi Pro League, and Ronaldo could score his thousandth goal somewhere around their AFC Champions League group stage clash with Al-Gharafa on December 8th.

– There is a counter-argument that Ronaldo will instead slow down in these final furlongs of his career. Recent evidence certainly suggests so. He’s drawn a blank in nine of his last 14 appearances for club and country. Since the summer, he’s averaged 0.42 goals per game. Maintain that rate, and he’ll need another 50 games to score the 21 goals required to reach number one thousand. That could be touch and go to make it before the end of Al-Nassr’s 2026-27 campaign, which is due to end in late May 2027. It could depend on how far they get in the continental and cup competitions.

– What kind of form he’ll show to get there is ultimately anyone’s guess. How he performs against Wales, Denmark and Norway (twice) under Portugal’s new manager in the upcoming international break ought to tell us a lot about what he can offer at this stage of his career.

– We’ll hedge our bets and estimate that Ronaldo’s form over the coming months will be somewhere between his spectacular peak and a severe decline. He is playing in the Saudi Pro League, after all, and his team is set-up to feed him chances. We predict that he’ll get three or four more goals for Portugal in this Nations League campaign, keep ticking along for Al Nassr, and eventually score his thousandth career goal when Al-Nassr take on Al-Khaleej in the Saudi Pro League on April 2nd, 2027.