Technology to save the Ballon d'Or

The Ballon d'Or is considered the main individual award in football (as silly as it is to have an individual award in a team sport), even more important than the FIFA player of the year award (FIFA used to participate in the Ballon d'Or award, but created its own, something that powerful people always do if they cannot have it their way). Over the 2010s the award was largely a competition between two of the most gifted players of all time, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. But as they have entered the winters of their careers the prize is now open for competition among many great (but not the greatest) players, and this year it was PSGs Ousmane Dembele who took the title that is decided among a vote from football journalists from all over the world.

In my personal and deeply subjective opinion, Ousmane Dembele is the correct winner in 2025; he has been on fire for PSGs Champions League and French champions, and has also become an important player in the French national team, finally showing the quality he was only able to show sometimes in FC Barcelona. He is a great player - but not one of the greatest, as were none of the other candidates to the title.

Of course, in a world of narcissists and sore losers nobody congratulates the winner but rather bitches that they should rather have won it, and invent conspiracy theories about the voting and the "objectivity of the voting journalists.

As if there was such a thing called "objectivity" when it comes to football...

So I have a proposal for everyone: why not let AI choose the best player in the world? We feed it all information of all players in the world for a year, and based on number of goals, passes, touches, minutes played; and partly on tournaments won and ranking of the teams played for and against, the AI could find a completely objective winner of the Ballon d'Or that you can not argue against!

Just as objective as VAR! 

Entitlement

I have never been a Real Madrid fan, but these days it is so much easier to dislike a club that despite all its great history and achievements, just feels entitled and bitter.

It comes down to the Balón d’or, a rather silly exercise in the subjective election of the “world’s best player” of football, a team sport… Vinicius Jr., and undoubtedly fantastic player did not get the title, which instead went to Rodri from Spain and Manchester City. Vinicius Jr., who has been a great speaker against racism in football and in Spanish society, felt dubbed and insinuated it was because of racism, while Real Madrid decided to boycott the Balón d’or ceremony, accusing it of manipulating the voting, an accusation that every day seems more common in politics when one loses, and has now also reached the world of football.

Petulant and arrogant behavior that symbolizes the times we live in: instead of congratulating someone, they act as if it is their right to win, and everything else is cheating and injustice. The worst part is that this attitude contributes nothing but minimizing trust in a society already lacking it, destroying faith in our relationships with people, and taking the attention away from the fact that Vinicius Jr. is indeed a fantastic player and that Real Madrid are indeed a great club.

They should be ashamed.

Misogyny is alive and thriving

I recently heard that the best footballer in the world, Ada Hegerberg, has decided not to play in this year's World Cup for her country, Norway, because of what she describes as a lack of respect for women's football in Norway.
How is this not bigger news?
If any of the world's biggest players decided not to go to a World Cup for discrimination in the game, would it not lead to changes in the way the game is managed??? But not in football!
Remember that Ms. Hegerberg is from Norway, a country where women have a higher degree of equality than in other countries. So just think about some of the other countries, where outright discrimination is more or less taken for granted: Colombia, where the football association does not even take care of their female national team; the World Champions of USA, who are grossly underpaid by their male counterparts (who did not even make it to the World Cup); Afghanistan, where players were routinely abused.... And these are just the cases we know about...
Football has long traditions of discrimination for reasons of race, nationality, political allegiance, sexual orientation, and not least gender, where women's football was even prohibited until not long ago, and misogynistic comments are so common as to be institutionalized in the entire game (remember how it was ok to ask Ms, Hegerberg to twerk after winning the Balon d'Or!?). And despite advances over the last decade, all these things show that misogyny is not only alive, but even thrives as male chauvinism reacts against women footballers demand their rightful place alongside men in the world of football. The fact that Ms. Hegerberg has decided to fight against this by not going to the World Cup should send a strong message to the world of football: stop discriminating against the best because of their gender!
The World Cup will be weaker without Ada Hegerberg, but I hope her message resonates in a world of football where discrimination, in all its forms, is the norm, and the football world does so little to combat.

The popularity contest winner (or Balon d'Or)

Cristiano Ronaldo is certainly a deserved winner of the 2013 FIFA Ballon d'Or award as the best player of 2013. He continued to be a wonderful player and has throughout the year stunned fans with fantastic goals and consistent quality performances for both Real Madrid and Portugal, whom he almost singlehandedly qualified for the World Cup. The award has been coming Ronaldo's way for many years, but he has been in the shadow of another great, Lionel Messi, who took the award the last four years. This year he "only" came second.
Although I congratulate Mr. Ronaldo, one really has to question an award that does appear more like a football popularity contest. 184 national team coaches and 184 team captains have a vote, as well as 173 media representatives, and one can see how each one voted on FIFA's website. Studying the results one realizes that in reality this award is given with a high degree of subjectivity (and surely us football fans are able to justify any subjective football opinion in the guise of subjectivity) that more resembles the voting of the Eurovision song contest, in particular amid the national team representatives! Just a few curious observations:

• 18 different players were among the first choices of the 2 x 184 coaches captains! So 18 different players are among the "best" in the world.
• 12 captains voted for a team-mate as best player in the world, either in the national team or in his club. While most of them are not surprising (like Iker Casillas voting for Ronaldo or Philipp Lahm voting for Frank Ribery), some are more curious, like Mario Yepes voting for Radamel Falcao, Gianluca Bufon voting for Andrea Pirlo (Pirlo's only vote) or William Ashley voting for Gareth Bale. Some also clearly vote for their buddies, like Lionel Messi voting for Andres Iniesta or Robien Van Persie voting for Arjen Robben.
• Luis Suarez received five votes in top 3 among the captains: his teammate Martin Skrtel voted him as best and so did his captain in Uruguay Diego Lugano. David Gerrard put him in his list as did the captains of Iraq and Turcos & Caicos Islands.
• The top contenders, like little children, did not give a single vote to each other: Lionel Messi voted for his buddies Iniesta, Xavi and Neymar, while Ronaldo voted for Radamel Falcao (quite obscure), Gareth Bale and Mesut Ozil (at least both Messi and Ronaldo had the decency not to vote for themselves!).
• The coaches were perhaps less varied, but many of the coaches who could, did vote for "their guy": Didier Deschamps voted for Ribery, Paulo Bento for Ronaldo (not surprising considering that he may not have been in the world cup without him!), Alejandro Sabella for Messi, Vicente del Bosque for Xavi, Erik Hamren for Ibrahimovic, Adam Nawalka for Robert Lewandoski Jose Pekerman for Radamel Falcao, and Chris Coleman for Gareth Bale. A couple of notable exceptions were Oscar Tabarez, who voted for Franck Ribery, or Luis Felipe Scolari, who voted for Ronaldo.
• With such voting it is perhaps disappointing that the Danish coach Morten Olsen did not vote for Nicklas Bendtner... But there did seem to also be a (very) small tendency to vote for players from ones region (Olsen voted for Ibramovic from neighbouring Sweden). Surely not among the South American captains and coaches where only three of each voted for Lionel Messi... But of 22 votes (from 1 to 3) received by Africa's best player Yaya Toure, 18 came from African countries (from captains, coaches and media). The remaining were from Belgium, Greece (both captains had Toure in their top-3), Cambodia (the coach had him as third choice) and Grenada (a media had him on third). 
• Asia in particular is a Messi-Ronaldo sphere of influence.

Perhaps all this just shows that it is all a bit arbitrary; I think it was no different when Messi won the previous years. That said, I also believe there is a memory lapse involved; if Messi had not been injured the last couple of months of the year, he may have had a better chance of winning.
Finally, there is certainly also a tendency to favour offensive and spectacular players. It is all but impossible to win this prize for defensive players, no matter how solid they are!

In any case, Ronaldo was the most popular player of the year, and he should be congratulated because he deserves it. He is a fantastic player indeed, but it is not because of this award!

Messi, the world's best

I must admit that although I greatly admire Lionel Messi, and probably agree that he is the most noteworthy player in the world, I am not wholly in agreement about winning the FIFA Balon d'Or today.
I am not sure what the criteria for the title are, but if they indeed are the player that seems to do the most amazing things on camera - the one that most looks like a Playstation player, it is indeed the little Argentinean Magician. But if, for a year, a player has been central - crucial - to teams that have played marvelously, been a core and steady player on winning teams, I am surely of the opinion that Xavi should have won.
But hey, I am not sure I know the criteria!
Anyway, congratulations to Messi! You are indeed a football God!