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Missed the chance. FIFA World Football Association Fifa had the opportunity to award Liverpool's defender Virgil van Dijk the prestigious Fifa award for Best Footballer in the World, the Player of the Year award. A type of player that is usually overlooked in such elections: defenders. They are important to their team. You decide games. But they rarely occur spectacularly and their actions can not cut so splendidly in highlight videos. The European Football Association Uefa had van Dijk after Liverpool's Champions League triumph quite rightly named Player of the Year.
In the Fifa election, the Dutch went out but empty. The award was won by Lionel Messi for the sixth time. This was not least due to the election system of Fifa, which comes straight from hell for compromise solutions. The winner of the Ballon d'Or is a quarter of the captains of the national teams, national coaches, journalists and fans determined. These are very many cooks for a fairly simple porridge.
Marco Bertorello / AFP
The eleven winning players around Lionel Messi (front left) were so staged at the gala in Milan
While the journalists clearly voted for Van Dijk, the other three groups voted for Messi. Fans like coaches saw Cristiano Ronaldo in front of van Dijk. Ironically, the coach! You should really appreciate the value of a defender. So in the future, if somebody complains that such awards favor spectacular players like Messi, journalists can only quote Uli Hoeneß: "You're responsible for the shit and not us!"
Loew did not have van Dijk on the slip
Since the vote is published transparently by Fifa, the election is always a political issue. Messi agreed with Liverpool's Sadio Mané for a player who knocked out Barcelona in the Champions League semifinals - and incidentally could not be dangerous to Messi's ambitions to become a world footballer.
Ronaldo chose Matthijs de Ligt, the center-back who eliminated him in the Champions League quarter-finals and moved from Ajax to Ronaldo club Juventus after the season for a staggering 85 million.
National coach Joachim Loew, however, surprised with the election of the Belgian Eden Hazard the best footballer of the planet. He did not even have van Dijk on the slip of paper, which may explain why the 28-year-old hit Holland twice with the Netherlands a year ago in the Nations League.
Eleven of the year with players who did not play at all
While the election for player of the year was a minor annoyance, the freestyle of the "FIFPro Men's World11" was simply absurd. This should represent the best team of the past season. Here were only football players eligible to vote, according to the FIFA "23000 players from 68 countries".
They chose with Sergio Ramos, Marcelo and Luka Modric three players from Real Madrid, the club that failed after three Champions League titles in a row in the knockout stages of the premier class and was 21 points behind Barcelona third in the Spanish league. Barça, however, did not play any role with Messi, Premier League winner Manchester City.
As the best left-back, for example, the players did not see Liverpool's Andrew Robertson or Barcelona's Jordi Alba. They chose Marcelo. He was sitting on the bench for weeks at Real, having reportedly returned from his winter vacation with seven pounds overweight. Also, Modric, last year's winner of the Ballon d'Or, did not show two strong games last season, unlike Citys Kevin de Bruyne, who shone week after week. One wonders: look footballers actually football?
Maybe you should leave such awards altogether. Football is a team sport. A team is more than the sum of their individual players. Individual awards run counter to this idea. There are already ways to determine the best players. They call themselves, for example, Premier League, Bundesliga or Champions League.
