So, Rodri is the latest winner of the Ballon d’Or. Lionel Messi Cristiano Ronaldo’s duopoly, only disrupted twice by Luka Modrić and Karim Benzema, has officially come to an end. The 28-year-old Spaniard is only the second midfielder to win the award since Kaka in 2007, and the first holding midfielder since Matthias Sammer in 1996.
Of course, he’s a player who is much more than his position defines. 23 goal contributions for Manchester City is quite simply not normal for a player in his role. Not to mention, he also won the Premier League and EURO2024, where he was the official player of the tournament. He has the credentials – and yet there are a great many people completely and utterly incensed about this whole thing.
Embed from Getty ImagesThat’s all down to one man: Vinícius Júnior. This was supposed to be his Ballon d’Or, and when Marca reported that he’d been informed he was indeed the winner back in late September, this was case closed.
He was a fairly popular winner, too. 24 goals and 11 assists was one thing; being the key man in the Real Madrid side which won both La Liga and the Champions League was another altogether. He may have struggled with Brazil at the Copa America, but if you’re the guy who stars in a successful Champions League campaign at Real Madrid, you’re pretty much accepted as the guy who will also win the Ballon d’Or, as Karim Benzema, Cristiano Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane will tell you.
Then, less than a week before he was supposed to collect the award, he scored an incredible hat-trick in against Borussia Dortmund at the Bernabéu. It felt like a victory lap.
But then everything changed. On the day of the ceremony no less, it was announced by The Athletic that not only would Vinícius Júnior not win the trophy, but he also wouldn’t even show up. Neither would Florentino Pérez, Carlo Ancelotti, or anyone else at Real Madrid: club policy.
Then followed the ever-sensible social media reaction. Richarlison predicted that if his international teammate didn’t win, expletives would go down. Mario Lemina said ‘bye football’ on his Instagram story after naming Vinícius as the best player in the world.
All of a sudden, no one is happy. The award is a sham, it has lost all credibility, it’s a robbery.
If that sums up how you’re feeling right now, it might be time to take a step back and consider: did the Ballon d’Or ever matter that much in the first place?
In a bizarre twist, it was a Real Madrid legend who made probably the most nuanced point: “Rodri will win the Ballon d’Or. I have never seen the importance of these individual awards in football. They have no place.”
Those are the words of Toni Kroos, the man who this year finished ninth.
While he may have taken that a tad far (individual brilliance has always been celebrated in football – it’s why kids flock to club shops to get their team’s best player on the back of their shirts), he’s definitely onto something.
It could certainly be argued that individual awards serve more as a PR exercise than a genuine appreciation of a player’s quality. The landscape of football would be no different if the Ballon d’Or didn’t exist, because it is fundamentally a team sport.
Embed from Getty ImagesEven more importantly is this: the Ballon d’Or is a matter of opinion. 100 journalists voted for their winner, all of them having their own views, all of them having their own biases. There is an obvious element of democracy here and there are criteria, but the fact of the matter is this: if you think Player X is the best footballer in the world, that is a matter of opinion. Some people think trophies matter more; others think stats. There is no factual basis whatsoever behind the winner. There never has been, there never will be.
This year was also particularly tight. There was no clear favourite until Marca said Vinícius was the winner. Up to that point, it was up in the air: it could’ve been him, it could’ve been Rodri, it could’ve been Jude Bellingham, it could even have been Dani Carvajal.
They may both still be active, but there are no Messis or Ronaldos in football right now; there are no players who are utterly dominant over the sport, and that hasn’t been the case since 2007. The relentless dominance and the heights achieved by those two have almost warped our perception of what the best player in the world is.
In many ways, the Ballon d’Or is returning to what it was before Messi and Ronaldo changed what it means to be the best footballer on the planet. For example, this year there were many candidates, there was no clear choice and the best players were all roughly on each other’s level. Before 2008, the award existed to celebrate stand out campaigns and it was different almost every year. Certain groups of perennially online, perennially furious football fans just weren’t around for that. It’s an alien concept.
This particular Ballon d’Or marks a shift in the sands of football. This is the sign that the duopoly is over, that any player can become the best in the world if they happen to play well enough for a good enough team that wins enough trophies. That hasn’t been the case for some 17 years (barring two singular exceptions courtesy of Luka Modrić and Benzema).
So, the fact of the matter is this: it might not really be all that important. Vinícius Júnior would have been a deserving winner. As would Bellingham. As is Rodri. Is celebrating an incredible holding midfielder really that bad? Probably not.