Ballon D'OR 2023

Mind boggling decision.

Seems a bit mad in a year he's effectively given up on top level football (particularly when not even making the playoffs with Miami) but I guess it's always the case to an extent in World Cup years. If a high profile fella has a great World Cup, it seems to far outweigh everything else. In his defence, I suppose it was a particularly epic world cup run. Should've still probably gone to someone playing at the top of the club game though.

Scandalous haaland didn't win that. 50 odd goals and a treble. Messi has given up on club football

They already have an award called the Golden Ball for best player at the World Cup. A player's form in major tournaments should be taken into consideration but it shouldn't be the be all end all.

If some club lower level bench warmer went and scored a hat trick in every match along the way to winning the World Cup for his country should he be chosen as the Ballon d'Or?

Messi has been poor at club level since moving to PSG, now he plays in a retirement league. He is the greatest of all time but there where other players more worthy than him over the last 12 months. I feel half the reason he won the award was almost down to sentiment.

Messi hasn't been at the races for most of the last 12 months. He's effectively retired at this stage.

We can talk about Haaland playing for a club with state ownership all day, it's a crap situation and it has distorted the game enormously, but Messi has been doing the same for a long time, Qatar's association with Barcelona, their ownership of PSG, his own association with Saudi Arabia and the huge pots of cash he's taken from all of the above.

Messi was a great player without a doubt, but as a person he's a greedy swine who has never seen a murderous regime he didn't want to take money from. Everything he's achieved is tainted by these associations, he didn't have to stoop that low but he did anyway because he's a greedy swine.

There's no moral high ground for Messi in that argument, he's swimming in the same cesspit as Haaland, but as players over the last 12 months Haaland has been head and shoulders above Messi.

Kevin Keegan in 78.

Its hardly the first time Messi has won an award he didn't deserve. Hell, its not even the first Ballon D'or that he robbed from a player who had had a better year.

He is one of the greatest no doubt, but he gets a lot of these awards on reputation alone, and unfortunately that devalues both him and the award.

I'll put it another way, if you put Messi in the Man City team instead of Haaland, how many goals would he have got? Not every player is in an as privileged position as Haaland is with great support players.

PSG and their galacticos copycat style didn't work, it never did and that's wasn't Messi's fault. He made the best around him and won the World Cup with Argentina(almost won it twice). He's not the first player to win the award off the back of doing so, and he won't be the last.

Lionel Messi won the Ballon D’Or in 2021.

Let’s just compare him with Robert Lewadowski over the 12 months of 2021.

Club goals                 Robert Lewandowski 58-34 Lionel Messi

Club assists               Robert Lewandowski9-14 Lionel Messi

International goals   Robert Lewandowski 11-9 Lionel Messi (This is Poland and Argentina mind!)

Hat-tricks                   Robert Lewandowski 5-1 Lionel Messi

Team trophies           Robert Lewandowski 3-2 Lionel Messi

Yup, seems completely like a valid award there !!!

It's hard to justify Messi winning it in 2021, but it's hard to make a case for anyone deserving it more in either 2019 or 2023. You can make the case for some people deserving it as much, but not more.

If you look at the voting in 2019 it was a razor thin margin (closest margin in its history from what I can see), but the exact same comments would have been made in reverse had van Dijk won. On one hand Messi obviously benefits from his reputation, but he also suffers from it. I think if you took people who hadn't seen Messi play before and asked them who the best player in the world was that year, Messi would have won by a wider margin.

This year was clear enough cut imo. The award was based on the 22/23 season so his time in Inter Miami is irrelevant. Everyone knows the World Cup heavily influences voting, and Messi had arguably the greatest World Cup campaign in history. Mbappe finished as runners-up, but he wasn't even the clear stand out performer for France. He also played for the same club team with worse individual stats. As far Haaland, he didn't really deliver in the latter stages of the CL this past season which was in stark contrast to Benzema the season before. Had he taken over a CL semi, or even the FA Cup final, his case would've been a lot stronger.

It's always the case in a World Cup year except 2010 the year Schneider won the CL and brought his nation to a WC final. Robben a CL and WC final and Xavi and Iniesta won the WC. Argentina got battered in the QF.

Messi still won.

Ronaldo won in 2014 despite Portugal not making it past the group stage.

The Ballon D'Or became a sht show when it became an extension of the tired Ronaldo vs Messi twitter crap.

You can make the same argument about Man City in the Champions League final. They were very fortunate to beat Inter Milan, Inter were the better team. Lukaku especially wasted some glorious chances. Haaland didn't have a good final, he managed 1 shot in the full match. He didn't play well in the semi-finals either. City could have easily lost that final and Haaland would have gone from finishing 2nd in the vote to who knows where.

How do you justify giving it to Xavi or Iniesta in 2010 when people watch them play in a team every single week with Messi and look inferior? If anything Messi should have more but people come up with different criteria to justify giving it to players who never came close to his level. Messi and Ronaldo were levels above anyone else, its really not any deeper than that.

Did you actually watch the world cup? Messi was unbelievable.

Xavi and Iniesta were inferior to no one. Probably 2 players who would be in anyone's top 5 midfielders certainly of the passed 30 years along with the likes of Pirlo and Zidane. The fact two generational talents like them played for the same club and country was lucky timing.

Attacking players will always grab the limelight but there's certainly a general appreciation for how good that Barca team was under Pep.

It's not about who you would rather sign. It's about who was better in a given year.

Henry Winter, editor-in-chief of The Times on why he voted for Leo Messi for the Ballon d'Or.

“This may be the last time we celebrate Messi as the best player in the world, but the issue has nothing to do with nostalgia, nor with clinging to a romance that is fading. Rather, Messi deserves the Ballon d'Or.

When I voted for England for the Ballon d'Or, I thought carefully about the incredible work of Haaland and Mbappé, studied their amazing statistics and best shots, and then came back to Messi.

Messi led Argentina to win the World Cup last season with a performance comparable to Maradona's in the 1986 World Cup.

Football is about titles and Messi's performance in Qatar showed that he deserved first place and six points. Although Messi's career was brilliant with four Champions League titles, he needed a World Cup.

All the pressure was on their shoulders, especially with a young coach like Scaloni and a team that included three important young players in Enzo, Álvarez and Mac Allister. At times, especially after the first surprising loss against Saudi Arabia, Messi was under more pressure, and when his country needed him most, Messi responded.

He won the award for best player in the World Cup and scored 7 goals of quality and variety: long-distance goals against Mexico and Australia, deep goals against France and penalty kicks taken with different left, right, high and low goals. Messi also gave three assists and played every minute of the tournament.

No player has taken more shots on goal than him (32). Only Antoine Griezmann has more key passes than Messi, who has 21. Only Musiala and Mbappé dribbled more than him, and no player was exposed to more fouls than him.

If some of those who mock him might suggest that referees are influenced by his reputation, the reality is that Messi is being attacked and his amazing movements confuse opponents who jump and catch him.

By all standards, Messi was the most effective in the most important tournament in sport, but Messi is not just numbers, he is much more. Messi is poetry. Messi is the one who surprises you. Messi is that sudden burst of speed and that touch to keep the ball away from a defender like Gvardiol.

Messi is a special role model for the younger generation who follows the stars as much as the teams. Attending a match with your team is completely different from another match. “A Messi match in itself is considered an event.”

It's not so much that you can't win one in Ligue 1 - it's that being in Ligue 1 won't contribute to winning it, carrying less weight for a claim than winning a bigger league. So your grounds for winning it would have to come almost entirely from European or International exploits - you basically HAVE to win a Champions League or World Cup to stand a chance.

Looking at this years top list - Messi and M'Bappe's claims for it would've been carried almost entirely by their international teams runs to the World Cup Final, with club performances barely a factor. Neymar shows the other side of it - Brazil haven't done much, and so Neymar's been miles out of the running every year despite winning lots of domestic titles and scoring lots of goals... he never even broken into the top 10 players any full season after he joined PSG. Quite a precipitous drop having been 3rd in his last year at Barca - a year when all they won was the Copa Del Rey, but just playing well and scoring goals in a tougher league got him up to top 3.