On Monday night, in Paris’s Theatre du Chatelet, the moment Lionel Messi was invited up to receive his eighth Ballon d’Or marked the very point when football’s most prestigious individual award morphed from recognising the best footballer of the year to becoming a long service medal. This was the climax of the Messi swansong, marking the final note of a great career, less a testament to current achievement, more an engraved carriage clock.
Which is not to decry from what Messi has done in the past. Make no mistake, he may well qualify as the finest footballer ever. Plus his performance in the Qatar World Cup, which apparently was the basis of his award, was magnificent, as he scored seven times to win Argentina the trophy. But here’s the thing: that was last December. And, as Fifa did in circumventing all their own rules to enable that tournament to be staged mid-season, so France Football, the organisers of the Ballon d’Or shamelessly undermined the integrity of the award by altering its parameters to take in last year’s World Cup and the football season, rather than the calendar year. In the process it makes it seem like the whole thing was fixed to make Messi a contender.
Because if the usual criteria were properly applied, the great man would be nowhere near the award. Since he lifted the World Cup, he has been on a protracted retirement tour, his current role adding lustre to David Beckham’s exercise in celebrity known as Inter Miami. Sure, he has scored 11 goals and delivered eight assists in just 11 games in Miami’s famous pink shirt (or as famous as a shirt can be since its release 18 months ago). But there is a minor caveat to that record: those goals were for Inter Miami. And even then only one of them came in Major League Soccer fixtures.
Meanwhile, in 2023, a certain Erling Haaland has 38 goals, a greater return than anyone else in Europe’s top leagues, and finished the 2022-23 campaign with 52 goals from 52 appearances. At the rate he is scoring, a half-century this year is easily within his reach by New Year’s Eve. Nor were these goals that helped win the Leagues Cup - or whatever the tinpot trophy was called that Messi accrued for Miami. They were scored in the most competitive of circumstances as he steered his Manchester City side to the treble.
For sure, Haaland did not feature in the World Cup, just as he won’t in next summer’s Euros. Like George Best, it is his misfortune to play for an international side that doesn’t qualify for the big tournaments. His only connection with last winter’s desert jamboree was to be seen with his Norway colleagues wearing t-shirts condemning the fact the tournament was being played in Qatar at all. Clearly not the sort of thing that goes down well in Fifa circles.
But actually there is something rather more significant behind the bizarre decision to give the trophy to Messi rather than the man who anyone with an operating pair of eyes can see deserved to be lauded: Haaland plays in England. And if you think that is simply being paranoid, check out the statistics. Since George Best won it in 1968, across 55 years only two Ballon d’Or winners have been based in this country: Michael Owen in 2001, after guiding Liverpool to a treble of FA Cup, League Cup and Uefa Cup and Cristiano Ronaldo, who picked up the first of his five in 2008, on the back of Manchester United winning the Champions League.
In that time Barcelona alone have had eleven winners and Real Madrid eight. Indeed, barring when Messi picked it up in 2021 during his brief, unhappy sojourn in Paris, every winner since 2009 has plied their trade in La Liga. Sure, in the last couple of years Sadio Mane, Kevin De Bruyne, Jorginho and Virgil van Dijk have all been nominated while representing Premier League clubs, as was Haaland this year. But they fell well short of accruing sufficient votes to take the title. And this season apparently the Fifa constituency preferred even the MLS to the Premier League. International distaste for - well, actually, jealousy of - the Premier League’s financial muscle appears long to have mitigated against votes being cast for its practitioners.
It seems as the old guard of Messi and Ronaldo - currently plying his trade in front of 700 fans on the playing fields of Saudi Arabia - buff up their pensions in mink-lined dustbin football and the new era begins, Haaland’s chances of adding the individual award to his haul of silverware next season is severely limited by his place of employment.
Worse still, this year may well have marked his best chance of landing the big one. Because in 2024 we know who is nailed on for the award. Not only did he win this year’s Young Player title, but Jude Bellingham has taken the precaution of plying his trade in the place where winners come from. He plays for Real Madrid.
