Many of us with wonderful comments and analysis on who the supposed true winner should be have failed to acknowledge one fact and that's other players and fans may speculate on who deserves it, but forget that it is the coaches and senior managers as well as captains that get to vote on who should be the true winner of the Ballon d'or.
Captains and coaches don't vote for the Ballon d'Or, journalists do. 100 journalists from the top 100 FIFA-ranking countries vote for the award.
Erling Halaand won the treble last year and still could not win the Ballon d’Or because FIFA’s favorite was meant to win for the last time. The world cheered and applauded Messi when he robbed Erling Haaland of his Ballon d’Or.
If you look at the history of the Ballon d'Or, in a World Cup year, the World Cup is mostly considered when given the Ballon d'Or. Messi led his team to win the award and was the best player in the tournament but you people feel Messi was not deserving of the award? Modric won the award for his World Cup performance. c'mon.
After FIFA promoted Messi and gave him endless awards at the very beginning of his career, there is no point in talking about any more controversial awards. Corruption won a long time ago. At the moment, Vinnie has not received an award, apparently due to the confrontation between UEFA and the Super League. I hope it starts in 2025 and we can forget about all this FIFA/UEFA/their awards, tournaments, etc.
Lmao.
You guys are so emotional it has removed every form of logic from your thinking.
We watched Messi week in and week out be the best player on the pitch and the week of every match day at his peak and yet you people still think he was favoured. It's laughable, to say the least. if we want to take away team performance and give the ballon d'or to only individual performance, then Messi will have more than 10 ballon d'ors because individual there are only a few seasons that any footballer had a better season than Messi at his peak. Let's be serious, please.
And that narrative of UEFA punishing Real Madrid is just bullshit. There's also the narrative of racism that's why Vini didn't win it. Please!!
Barcelona and Real Madrid are the two clubs that pushed for the Super League the most and their presidents were both very vocal about it, why is it only Real Madrid who is the biggest club in Europe and UCL's Golden Club the only one being punished?
Madrid was the club of the year, and Madrid's manager was the best coach.
We need to end all these mental gymnastics and face the truth, Rodri had a better season than Vinicius. Jude Bellingham and Lautaro Martinez also had a better season than Vinicius.
Up until March of this year, the player everybody pushed for the Ballon d'Or was Bellingham till Vinicius had those performances in the late stages of the Champions league and the final the the narrative changed because of recency bias.