Madrid wail for Ronaldo as slapstick farce that surrounds Ballon d’Or descends to a Real low
EACH year the awards season becomes more like a
Three Stooges episode. Metaphorically at least, the combatants poke each other in the eye, bash each other over the head with fryingpans or planks of wood, each tumbling over the other to look more vindictive, more pompous, more ludicrous, more stupid.
It starts, where else, with all the venal, pointless bile on social media: ‘My favourite is better than your favourite,’ which resembles nothing more closely than the playground ‘my dad could batter your dad’. You know the stuff.
But year-on-year the participants and football powers-that-be are abandoning dignity quicker than an I’m a Celebrity contestant.
Last year, we had the risible Sepp Blatter prancing about the stage at the Oxford Union impersonating Cristiano Ronaldo as some sort of stentorian automaton who ‘spends more expenses on his hair than “the other one’’’ and lauding his personal ‘preference’ for Lionel Messi because ‘he’s a nice boy’.
It was all against the delightful background of FIFA forgetting that they were running a World Cup the following summer, easy mistake, and thus that there were World Cup qualifying playoffs in November 2013.
The polls closed before the infamous Zlatan v Ronaldo playoff ‘supermatches’ which were bound to influence the voters (FIFA’s international coaches, captains and a select band of journalists) and so a vast amount of them just didn’t bother responding.
FIFA ‘re-opened’ the polls, announced that those who’d already marked their ‘X’ couldn’t vote again (to take account of Ronaldo’s fabulous performance in eliminating Sweden in that playoff), then informed them that they actually could.
Madrid demanded an apology on behalf of Ronaldo, got it, and CR7 duly won. Franck Ribéry, principal star of Bayern Munich’s treble season, was in tears and even now he’s still harping on about it in interviews: ‘I learned a lot during last year’s Ballon d’Or gala. As soon as I got there, I told my wife that I would lose,’ he whined last week.
‘I saw how Blatter was hugging Ronaldo and how his entire family was there. I’m not stupid. It was clear that he had to win it. He wouldn’t have brought his entire family with him otherwise.
‘It will be the same this year. Manuel Neuer or Arjen Robben should win it. You can’t disagree with this. Manu has won it all, he’s a great guy and he isn’t arrogant. Arjen has played an incredible season in the Bundesliga and then a fantastic World Cup.
‘But I fear it will be about politics again. The Ballon d’Or is no longer for the best player. Fabio Cannavaro won it in 2006 because he won the World Cup, that’s all.’
Now Franck isn’t known for his University Challenge capabilities. But, I ask you. Robben or Neuer ‘should get’ the Ballon d’Or this year for their fantastic World Cups, but Cannavaro was a blaggard and a conman of the first order when winning it ... for World Cup 2006. Give us strength.
And if Blatter was fawning all over Ronaldo, then lingering embarrassment at his Oxford Union stupidity might explain it. This weekend, it’s all taken a new, nonsensical turn.
Asked, well after voting had closed, about the Ballon d’Or, UEFA chief Michel Platini replied that, in a World Cup year, one of the players who’d lifted that trophy in the summer should automatically be Ballon d’Or winner, too.
He repeated an opinion he’d given four years earlier when Xavi and Andres Iniesta were both pipped by Messi because of his individual brilliance in a year when Spain became world champions. Both Spaniards admitted that they were pleased Messi won. Platini put into words a sentiment that many (particularly the voting journalists, I believe) hold – but I’d also ask how many of you really think that the FIFA coaches and captains will now be remonstrating themselves and banging fists against their own head after the Frenchman spoke?
Imagine it: ‘World Cup!?!? Bloody hell, I never even THOUGHT of making that part of my consideration!!!’ or: ‘Dammit – Platini’s come out for a World Cup winner to lift the Ballon d’Or, if I’d only known how he’d vote then I’d obviously have trotted along behind him like an obedient little sheep.’
But, oh no. Real Madrid issued a statement remonstrating with Platini for answering a question posed to him by a Spanish news agency, declaring that anyone who opposes Ronaldo for this award is an ideological criminal and questioning his impartiality despite the presence of World Cup winning Toni Kroos in their own first XI.
While all of this was happening, a much stranger fact emerged. The players world union FIFPRO hadn’t found a place for either Koke or Gabi in their top 15 midfielders of 2014 despite the Atletico Madrid pair’s excellence in winning the Spanish League, Supercup and coming within seconds of winning the Champions League.
Weird, I’d suggest. Wrong in my view. But football democracy in action. FIFPRO’s voting is not immune to errors or manipulation but the players had their voice and it didn’t shout: ‘Atletico!’
Tomorrow we’ll know the final three for the Ballon d’Or. Hopefully they are Ronaldo, Neuer and Messi. I’d expect the podium to reflect that order in January. But, if it doesn’t, don’t expect me to join the pitiful Three Stooges pantomime.