The Ballon d’Or is the most prestigious individual soccer award of the year, given to the most outstanding player over a 12-month period. However, Lionel Messi essentially won the championship at the end of last year, in just about a month.
Messi, 36, won the award for the eighth time on Monday and his first since signing with Major League Soccer’s Inter Miami in July. The women’s award went to World Cup champion Spain’s Aitana Bommatti of Barcelona for the first time.
Messi’s achievements in Miami were great, but he did not win any awards. Rather, it was his performance that helped lead Argentina to their first World Cup since 1986 last December. Just when it looked like his career would end without lifting a cup, he helped his country win the title with seven goals, including two in the final. against France. He also won the tournament’s Most Valuable Player Award.
This performance more or less cemented the Ballon d’Or 11 months before it was handed to him. In the meantime, he reportedly left Paris Saint-Germain and signed a contract with Miami worth more than $50 million a year.
When MLS started in 1996, frankly the only hope was to survive in a country obsessed with soccer, baseball and basketball. Indeed, few would have thought that the world’s best player would be plying his trade in the United States by 2023.
Messi won the Ballon d’Or for his performance at the World Cup in Qatar, not the League Cup in Miami. Still, the award was a coup for MLS, which has already gained worldwide recognition with his signing. Sales of Messi’s pink Inter jersey skyrocketed around the world, putting the league on the map in a place that had previously gone largely unnoticed.
Messi first won six Ballons d’Or while playing for Barcelona, the club he has represented since he was 13 years old. When the club fell into financial trouble, he tearfully moved to PSG, which was financed by Qatar. However, although he won one more Ballon d’Or, his time there was mostly unhappy and ended in a bitter divorce.
Then he headed to Miami, where he didn’t look like he was in his late 30s playing strings. He led Inter to victory in the League Cup between the Mexican and MLS teams, scoring a tournament-leading 10 goals. However, the team was terrible even before his arrival and was buried too deep in the standings to qualify for the MLS Cup playoffs.
Although Messi has declared himself happy in Miami, “one never fully adapts to this climate,” he said in August.
The debate before the award centered around whether Messi’s great month at the World Cup outweighed the great year of play by Norwegian striker Erling Haaland, who won almost every club trophy with mighty Manchester City. The focus was on. Voters thought so. Haaland took second place.
Messi’s eighth Ballon d’Or win is another positive result in the long-running battle with Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo for the best player of his generation. Cristiano Ronaldo is second in history with five awards since 1956. , the 38-year-old seems unlikely to win any more, especially after signing an unheralded big-money deal with Saudi league side Al Nasr late last year.
This year’s Ballon d’Or award, to be announced at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, will be open to performances from August 2022 to July 2023, and will be decided by votes from 100 soccer journalists from 100 countries.
The 25-year-old midfielder Bommatti helped her club Barcelona win Europe’s biggest competition, the Champions League, and was awarded the Women’s Ballon d’Or.
She was named the tournament’s MVP after scoring three goals in a performance at the World Cup, which was strictly outside the scope of player judging, as Spain defeated England 1-0 in the final in Sydney in August. The acquisition surpassed that result.
By studying performance data, working with his own fitness coaches, nutritionists and psychologists, and reading, Bommatti has cultivated a reputation as an athlete who constantly seeks improvement. “I try to understand everything,” Ms. Bonmati, the daughter of two Catalan literature instructors, told The New York Times in June. “I’m a very curious person.”
Her Spain and Barcelona teammate, former two-time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putelas, was injured for most of the year.