Ronaldo and Messi Birth Charts: No Retrograde Planets vs Five

Between Christmas Eve 1984 and the early hours of February 6, 1985, not a single planet was retrograde. Three athletes were born in that 43-day window: LeBron James, Lewis Hamilton and, on its last full day, Cristiano Ronaldo. Lionel Messi was born two and a half years later, when five planets were retrograde at once: Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Our birth chart reading flags both in its chapter "What's rare in your chart": a chart with no retrograde planets turns up in about 1 person in 10, and one with five or more in about 1 in 14. We counted retrograde planets for every hour from 1900 to 2030 and found that the two opposite patterns peak in the same years, the 1980s above all. Right now, until October 16, 2026, the sky again has five retrograde planets, the same count as on Messi's birthday. Every story about the people below comes from their own interviews and speeches, linked at the end.

What a retrograde planet is, and how many a chart usually has

A planet is called retrograde when, seen from Earth, it seems to move backward through the zodiac. It does not really turn around. Earth overtakes it on its orbit, the way a fast train overtakes a slow one on the next track, and for a while its path against the stars looks reversed. The farther out the planet, the longer this lasts. Averaged over 1900–2030, Mercury is retrograde about 70 days a year, Venus 26, Mars 34, Jupiter 111 and Saturn 133, while Uranus, Neptune and Pluto spend 151 to 159 days a year going backward, close to half the time. The Sun and Moon never go retrograde, so astrologers count eight planets, Mercury to Pluto, and so does our chapter.

How many of them are retrograde in your chart depends only on your birthday. Here is how often each count occurs for people born from 1960 to 2008, as a share of time:

Two people in three have one, two or three retrograde planets, and the average is 2.3. At no point in those 130 years were all eight retrograde at once. Our chapter's own table, built from 100,000 charts, gives the same picture: 10.55% of charts with none and 6.95% with five or more.

Why the two opposite patterns come in the same years

The two patterns sound like opposites, yet they rise and fall together. The reason is the four slow planets. Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto go retrograde when they stand roughly opposite the Sun. When all four are bunched in one stretch of sky, the Sun lines up opposite them at about the same time, so they spend months retrograde together, and one more retrograde planet is enough to make five. Half a year later the Sun passes close to them, all four move forward, and if Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter are moving forward as well during those weeks, there are no retrograde planets at all.

In the mid-1980s the slow planets were packed tight: Saturn and Pluto in Scorpio, Uranus in Sagittarius, Neptune in Capricorn, all four within less than 90°. That decade the sky had no retrograde planets 22.9% of the time and five or more 17.2% of the time, against 8.9% and 5.6% on average across 1900–2030. In the 1960s, with the slow planets spread out, the figures fell to 4.0% and 3.4%, and in 1964–1966, 1973–1975 and 2003–2005 there was not a single hour without a retrograde planet. The next years like that are 2028 and 2029.

The celebrity database behind our chapter mirrors the sky almost exactly. Of 594 well-known people born in the 1980s, 21.0% have no retrograde planets and 18.9% have five or more; of 389 born in the 1960s, it is 2.1% and 3.9%. So whether someone has either pattern depends largely on their birth year.

Forty-three days with nothing retrograde

On December 24, 1984, Mercury ended its backward run, and none of the eight planets was retrograde any more. That lasted 43 days, until the night of February 5 to 6, 1985, when Pluto turned back. LeBron James was born in those weeks (December 30, in Akron, Ohio), and so were Lewis Hamilton (January 7, in Stevenage) and Cristiano Ronaldo (February 5, in Funchal on Madeira), on the window's last full day.

Messi was born in Rosario on June 24, 1987. Three days earlier Mercury had turned retrograde and joined Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, which had been going backward since February to April, and the five lasted together for 24 days, until July 15.

A window with no retrograde planets usually lasts about 26 days, and one with five or more about 20, though some run three times as long. Anne Hathaway was born in one of the longest windows with none, from October 11, 1982 to January 7, 1983. The record for five or more since 1900 is a hundred days in the spring of 1982, and the Russian actress Yulia Snigir was born in the third-longest, from April 1 to July 1, 1983.

What astrologers say about them

The American astrologer Erin Sullivan wrote in Retrograde Planets (1992) that a person with no retrograde planets usually builds a strong, unified sense of self, and gave Mick Jagger as her example, while for people with many retrograde planets the inner life is often more real than any outside influence. Our chapter calls the first pattern "What you plan, you do": "There is almost no gap between your decision and your action: planned in the morning, underway by evening. Looking back and revising bores you, so you fix mistakes on the move while going forward." The second is "Living at your own pace": "Decisions ripen inside you, and rushing you is pointless. You revise and redo a lot, and you go back to old ideas, people and places to see them anew."

Decide, then do it

On May 26, 2018, in Kyiv, Real Madrid won a third Champions League in a row, and straight after the final Ronaldo told beIN Sports: "In the next few days I will give an answer to the fans that have always been on my side. It was very nice to be at Real Madrid, in the coming days I will talk about it more." He was already speaking about the club in the past tense, and in July he joined Juventus. At Euro 2024, in the last-16 match against Slovenia, goalkeeper Jan Oblak saved his penalty in extra time and Ronaldo cried on the pitch. When the game went to a shootout, he took Portugal's first kick and scored. "First it was sadness and then it was joy," he said afterward. "That's what football gives you: inexplicable moments, a bit of everything."

Lewis Hamilton was ten and the new British karting champion when he went to the Autosport Awards in 1995. His father pointed out Ron Dennis, the head of McLaren, and in a 2021 fan Q&A Hamilton remembered what came next: "So, literally before my dad had finished explaining to me about Ron Dennis, I went over to him straight away." He told Dennis: "Hi, I'm Lewis Hamilton, and I've just won the British Karting Championship, and one day I want to be Formula 1 World Champion in your car." Dennis signed his autograph book and said: "Phone me in nine years." Hamilton made his Formula 1 debut in 2007, with McLaren, while Dennis was still in charge.

LeBron James announced in April 2003 that he would go straight from high school to the NBA: "When you see there's no way you can get any hotter ... You've got to take on an opportunity when it's in front of you and that's what made me make this decision." Freddie Mercury told Melody Maker in 1981 that "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" took him "five or ten minutes." In July 1986 he said on Spanish television that the main reason for his visit to Barcelona was that he wanted to meet the opera singer Montserrat Caballé, and when they met on March 24, 1987, he brought a tape of a song he had written specially for the occasion.

When Anne Hathaway was up for Les Misérables, she was told she was too old for Éponine and Cosette and probably too young for Fantine. "I agreed I was too old for Éponine and Cosette, but I got fiery and determined and pushed my way into an audition for Fantine," she said in 2012.

Let it ripen, then go back

On June 26, 2016, Argentina lost the Copa América final, and Messi told reporters: "That's it. The national team is over for me. It's been four finals. It's not for me." Six and a half weeks later, on August 12, he announced he was coming back: "A lot of things went through my mind on the night of the final and I gave serious thought to quitting but my love for my country and this shirt is too great." He won the World Cup in 2022, at his fifth attempt. In 2024 he explained why he walks during matches: "When I walk, it's because I'm studying how the opponent is set up, how we stand without the ball, how to get away from my marker and start a counterattack." And in the summer of 2023 he admitted he had very much wanted, and hoped, to be able to go back to Barcelona.

Ronaldinho was there at the very start of Messi's career. On May 1, 2005, against Albacete, he twice set up the 17-year-old with a through pass: the first finish was ruled offside, the second counted, and it was Messi's first official goal for Barcelona. In June 2026 Ronaldinho, then 46 and last a professional player in 2015, signed with the Italian Serie C club Ravenna, his second Italian club after AC Milan.

Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College but stayed on to drop in on classes, among them calligraphy. "None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me," he said at Stanford in 2005. In the same speech he said you can only connect the dots looking backward, and he described being fired from the company he had started this way: "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything." Later Apple bought his company NeXT, and Jobs returned to Apple.

In July 2004, at a conference in Dublin, Stephen Hawking announced that information falling into a black hole is not lost after all, the opposite of what he had long argued, and conceded a bet to the physicist John Preskill, paying up with an encyclopedia of baseball. "It is great to solve a problem that has been troubling me for 30 years," Hawking said.

In 1981, during a break between seasons of the Canadian sketch show SCTV, Catherine O'Hara agreed to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. When SCTV was picked up again, she left SNL after a week, before her first episode aired. "Basically I said, 'Oh, sorry, I gotta go be with my [comedy] family,'" she explained in 2024. Daniel Day-Lewis has walked away from acting twice. After The Boxer in 1997 he left to become a shoemaker in Italy and came back in 2002 with Gangs of New York; after Phantom Thread in 2017 he announced he was done, and in 2025 he returned in Anemone. "I never intended to retire, really. I just stopped doing that particular type of work so I could do some other work," he said.

Ahead of the 2024 film of The Master and Margarita, in which she played Margarita, Yulia Snigir said she had read Bulgakov's novel three times: "I remember that at some point I could even catch the scent of the oil described in the Yershalaim chapters."

The people in this article

No birth times were needed for this table: for all thirteen the pattern holds from midnight to midnight.

Where the method stops

We picked these stories already knowing each person's pattern, and any long public life contains both quick decisions and returns, including the lives of the people above. LeBron James, with no retrograde planets, went back to Cleveland in 2014 and wrote in Sports Illustrated: "I always believed that I'd return to Cleveland and finish my career there. I just didn't know when." Ronaldo returned to Manchester United in 2021, and after Portugal lost to Spain at the 2026 World Cup he said he would take his time and "not make rash decisions" about his future. Stallone told AARP in 2025 that in the famous three days he wrote only "a spine" of Rocky, and the magazine puts the number of drafts at around fifteen. It works the other way too. Messi chose Miami quickly in the summer of 2023 because he did not want to wait again to see what would happen and leave his future in someone else's hands. O'Hara walked out on SNL a week after saying yes, and later admitted: "Yeah, not cool to take a job and leave it."

There is a bigger caveat as well. Both patterns depend so heavily on where the slow planets stand that celebrities get them exactly as their birth years predict. Take the 3,196 people in our database born in 1900 or later, look up what share of each person's birth year carried the pattern, and you would expect 11.3% with no retrograde planets and 7.7% with five or more; the real figures are 11.0% and 8.5%. Fame does not follow from either pattern, and what they say about character can only be read together with the rest of the chart.

How to count the retrograde planets in your chart

Calculate your birth chart. For these two patterns you usually do not need a birth time, only the date, as long as no planet changed direction that day. The reading includes the chapter "What's rare in your chart," which shows whether you have either pattern and which famous people share it. Right now, from October 3 to 16, 2026, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are all retrograde, so anyone born these days gets Messi's pattern. The next stretch with no retrograde planets runs from April 13 to May 8, 2027, and in 2028 and 2029 there will be none at all.