Casemiro has offered a clear verdict on the make-up of the Real Madrid generation in which he played alongside Cristiano Ronaldo. The Manchester United departing midfielder recalled his four seasons with Ronaldo at Real Madrid, a period that yielded the Champions League on each occasion, and described a team-mate who to him combined a wider range of attributes than the Portugal forward.<\/p>\n
On Rio Ferdinand Presents, Casemiro singled out Gareth Bale for particular praise. “Cristiano scores 50 goals, but Bale is attack, defend, head, score,” he said, before adding: “Cristiano is the best, another world. But Bale is more complete. Everything, he does very good. Very quick, too strong. For me, Bale is an unbelievable player.”<\/p>\n
Casemiro also used the interview to set out his views on modern passing and creativity. He criticised what he called sterile possession that preserves statistics rather than threatening the opposition. “You finish the game and [a player] has [completed] 97% of passes. But what\u2019s the pass? Pass back, pass back, pass back. Negative passing,” he said.<\/p>\n
Those principles explain his admiration for Bruno Fernandes. Casemiro praised the United captain\u2019s relentless forward intent and his willingness to accept risk in order to hurt opponents. “You need to play forward. It doesn\u2019t matter if you lose the ball. Of course, sometimes you need to play good [by keeping the ball]. But what I love about Bruno is he plays forward every time. Every time, he kills the opposing team: ‘You give me space, I kill you.'”<\/p>\n
Fernandes\u2019s numbers for 2025\u201326 were used to underline Casemiro\u2019s point. The United captain has created 124 chances and 30 ‘big chances’ with two games remaining. “I love Bruno\u2019s game because of this, assist, pass, pass, every time pass it forward.” The piece contrasted those totals with the next most creators: Liverpool\u2019s Dominik Szoboslai with 67 chances and Manchester City\u2019s Rayan Cherki with 18 big chances. By comparison, Szoboszlai\u2019s accuracy is 87.7%, while Bernardo Silva sits north of 90%. Casemiro made his preference clear: he values forward, decisive passing over safe statistics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Casemiro: Bale more complete than Ronaldo; he praises Bruno Fernandes for forward passing. always on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13762,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,172,987],"tags":[1162,1637,342],"class_list":["post-13763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-manchester-united","category-epl","category-real-madrid","tag-analytics","tag-assists","tag-bruno-fernandes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}