Tifo wants to reimagine football history.
Since 2008, only three different players have won the Ballon d’Or:
Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Luka Modric.
But what if Ronaldo and Messi hadn’t been eligible for that award? What if – maybe – they
had been excluded from the voting and they had just competed for their own private trophy?
Modric would still have won in 2018, but what – according to the voting
records - might the last decade-and-a-half have looked like without the duopoly?
Well, Fernando Torres would actually have won in 2008. Before the injuries,
before that move to Chelsea, he had scored the winning goal in that year’s European
Championship final and had just enjoyed a second stellar season with Liverpool.
Between 2009 and 2012, though it would have been a different sort of duopoly.
Xavi finished third behind Messi and Ronaldo in 2009 after Barcelona’s LaLiga,
Copa Del Rey and Champions League treble. And he was on the shortlist again the next year,
having won the World Cup with Spain – but he still finished behind Andres Iniesta,
who finished second to Messi having scored the winning goal in that World Cup final,
in the 1-0 extra-time victory over the Netherlands.
Another Champions League-La Liga double would have
meant that Xavi – again – would have been our winner in 2011,
and that completed three straight third-placed Ballon d’Or finishes for the legendary playmaker.
Is he the best player never to actually win the award? He’s certainly in the conversation.
Iniesta is part of that discussion too – he would have won again in 2012. There was no La Liga or
Champions League title for Barcelona that season, but he was the attacking craft behind the Spanish
side who were far, far too good for everyone else in that summer’s European Championship.
In 2013, a new winner: Bayern Munich won the Bundesliga, the DFB Pokal, the Club World Cup
and the Champions League, the latter in that memorable Wembley final against Borussia Dortmund,
and that was enough for Franck Ribery to take third place,
or to lift the Ballon d’Or in our Messi and Ronaldo-less world.
In 2014, another Bayern Munich icon: Manuel Neuer would have followed Germany’s World Cup
win in Brazil by being anointed the best player in the world, and becoming the first goalkeeper
to earn that honour since Lev Yashin in 1963. Gigi Buffon finished second in 2006 – Italy won
the World Cup year – but Neuer remains the last player to feature on a Ballon d’Or shortlist.
Neymar would have restored the forward orthodoxy in 2015. He scored 39 all-competition goals for
Barcelona the season before, and won the Champions League. He’d have won again in
2017 had it not been for Messi and Ronaldo, but in the year between, after France were runners-up
at the European Championship and Atletico Madrid reached the final of the European Cup,
Antoine Griezmann would have been putting the Golden Ball on his mantel.
2018 was Luka Modric, he gets to keep his win,
but in 2019 Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk would have succeeded him. It’s arguable that he
should have done anyway, but he finished just seven votes short of Messi and in second place.
In 2020 Covid cancelled the awards – let’s give that one to Robert Lewandowski outright,
who probably had the strongest case of anyone. And without Messi he would
have completed a double, winning again in 2021
after scoring 41 goals in a Bundesliga season and breaking Gerd Muller’s previous record of 40.
And that covers the literal beneficiaries, but it’s also worth considering the many
great players who missed out on the shortlist because of Messi and Ronaldo,
and would otherwise, in a different era, have received far more acclaim.
Arjen Robben, for instance, who never made the final three,
but who finished fourth in 2014. Luis Suarez, whose best finish was a fourth-place in 2016.
Like Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who never came closer to the podium than fourth in 2013.
Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah are other, obvious absentees. They finished fourth and fifth
respectively in 2019 and have never been that close before or since. And Karim Benzema, too,
who finished fourth in 2021 despite a remarkable three-year run of form at Real Madrid.
N’Golo Kante has never finished higher than 5th. Kevin De Bruyne’s best result is eighth.
Dani Alves was never a top-three finisher, nor were Gerard Pique, Sergio Ramos, Philipp Lahm,
Wayne Rooney, Sergio Aguero, Yaya Toure or Andrea Pirlo.
The standard has been stratospheric, and even with our Messi-Ronaldo adjustment
there remain a whole host of world class players cast in the shade.