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Graham Hunter, Spain writer
Spain’s continued dominance of global football will be underlined this week when the longlist of this year’s men’s Ballon d’Or candidates is announced, and then it will be 24-carat gold-plated at the end of October when the winner is announced in Paris. The winner, and most of the top five, will either be Spanish or play their club football in LaLiga.
Whether by nationality or training, nature or nurture, Spanish football is the cradle of all that’s thrilling, intelligent, uplifting and, ultimately, victorious in world football. And it has been so for decades. Yah, boo, sucks to the Premier League — it’s going to be official.
The top two will be from Vinícius Júnior and Rodri, while the next-best in class should be from Jude Bellingham, Dani Carvajal, Toni Kroos and Lamine Yamal. A mix of those who either grew up being trained the Spanish way (own the ball, do intelligent things with it, repeat ad infinitum) or needed to move to LaLiga to flourish and to be properly recognised.
Following a recent change introduced by the French organisers of the Ballon d’Or, the judges (nominated football reporters from FIFA’s top 100 nations) will be asked to consider only the 2023-24 season. However, the criteria sent to those venerable voters make interesting reading; there is no explicit mention of trophies won, for example.
The organisers (a combination of L’Equipe, France Football and UEFA) want those 100 reporters to take these factors into account when they vote for their top five players:
1. Individual performance, decisiveness and impressiveness
2. Collective performance and track record
3. Class and fair play
I’m going to declare my colours here and now (albeit that I don’t have a vote). I won’t grumble whether Rodri or Vinícius wins — and it will be one or the other.
My personal selection, by a whisker, would be Rodri. He is, by a distance, the most complete player in any position anywhere in the world. And that’s proven not only by stats (74 games without defeat in any 90-minute match for Manchester City between February 2023 and May 2024), an unquenchable flow of Premier League titles, back-to-back international trophies with Spain over the last year, but also proven by his exceptional football intelligence. Leadership, goals, inexhaustible stamina, vision, technical excellence, aerial ability, articulacy — Rodrigo Hernández has the lot.
But, like teen sensation Yamal, who I’ll talk about in a moment, I suspect that Rodri might just be one of the ‘victims’ of this process, and I’ll be gutted for both of them if so.
The reason is that players in Rodri’s position almost never win this award. And players who dart, and thrill, and invent, and score and create and frighten defenders, like Vinícius repeatedly does, almost always do.
There have been 45 winners from 20 different nations since the Ballon d’Or was invented in 1956. Only two, Matthias Sammer and Lothar Matthäus, played in a remotely similar role to Rodri. Sammer was the last of those two imperious, ferocious German sweeper/midfielders to win this trophy, and that was 28 years ago.
The case for Vinícius, meanwhile, is obvious. And while the Ballon d’Or is meant to be awarded for his 10 months from August 2023 onwards, anyone who has been reading my columns here about the Brazil forward for the last five years knows how much I adore this man who’s magic in a bottle.
If “track record” is meant to matter as guidance to voters, then Vinícius has that: 12 major club trophies aged only 24, plus a 100% record of scoring and winning in two Champions League finals. And, given that the guy who stands on this podium isn’t supposed to do so only because of trophies won in the previous season, this is where Vinícius probably edges it over Rodri.
For nearly two decades the Ballon d’Or was dominated by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo because they stand significantly apart from everyone except four or five other men in the entire history of the sport. But now that neither of them will ever win it again, we are moving into a era where your football probably needs to be ‘clippable’ in order to add vote-winning lustre to your season. By which I mean that everything which glitters will be gold.
It’s far easier for fans and analysts of all different ages and experience, TV producers, social-media fanatics and (hell, let’s admit it) journalists or editors to grab a clip of a skill, an assist, a goal and either broadcast it or publish it online and watch it go global — viral is the clumsier, uglier word for it.
The type of brilliance which Rodri embodies — still qualities which will command the maximum transfer fees, the highest wages, and monstrous calibre which will continue to win players like him, and their clubs, trophies for as long as football exists — is just that little bit harder to let shine in a 10-second clip. How much does he care about that? Very little at all, I imagine.
I spent half an hour with Rodri during Euro 2024, interviewing him for a UEFA masterclass video. This is a man who intimately understands his position, his role, his own qualities, his learning process under City manager Pep Guardiola, his opportunities to keep on winning major trophies. He isn’t only blessed with the ability to impose those qualities but to explain them, to help others comprehend (players, journalists, fans) and, one day, will be able to lead the club he chooses either as a coach, technical director or president.
But he’s less likely to nutmeg a full-back, twist, turn, draw adulatory ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ from an adoring crowd before delivering a searing assist or score into the top corner with the outside of his right boot. There’s your “X” factor which might well nudge Vinícius ahead over the next month or so of voting.
3:10
How fate led to a photograph capturing ‘the beginning of two legends’
Meet photographer Joan Monfort, who in 2007 captured Barcelona’s young star Lionel Messi posing with a baby Lamine Yamal for a charity calendar.
Which takes me, finally, to Yamal. If you apply the boxing term ‘pound-for-pound’ to the 17-year-old right now then he’s at or around an equal for Rodri or Vinícius in how much he merits winning this award which, despite its many flaws, remains one of the most solid indications of greatness.
I know, I know… having established that this prize pertains to last season, not the weeks since the new campaign started, I’m cheating by mentioning the fact that there’s no one in the world right now who’s more thrilling, more uplifting, more astonishing than Yamal.
I believe, too, that he’s a dead cert to win the junior Ballon d’Or — named the Kopa Award after Real Madrid’s 1958 Ballon d’Or winner Raymond Kopa — at the same ceremony as the big prize in Paris on Monday, Oct. 28.
I say dead cert because that’s how I see it, even though I reckon there will be an anomaly of Bellingham (the reigning Kopa holder) nudging Yamal out of the top three in the Ballon d’Or but being pipped for the Kopa Trophy — for which the England star was still eligible last season — by Barcelona’s extraordinary prodigy.
Let me give you a little context. You’ll have watched how Yamal, last season, ripped up the record books for Barcelona and Spain by doing many things more precociously than Pelé, Messi, Ronaldo, Johan Cruyff or pretty much any legend you’d care to mention. Then he stood up for thrilling, attacking, inventive football during a European Championship when too many top international sides and star players were fixated by not losing.
This season, shrugging aside the impact of a violent attack on his father, Lamine has continued to carry Barcelona’s first team on his shoulders having just turned 17 in the summer.
In the entire, glorious, history of the Ballon d’Or the youngest player ever to have made the top three is Ronaldo Nazario back in 1996 aged 20 years and three months, narrowly pipping the only other 20-year-olds to have made the podium: Portugal’s Eusébio (1962), Italy’s Gianni Rivera (1963) and Messi (2007).
Now, Yamal is blessed with the same brand of football intelligence as Rodri — a little whirring, ultra-sharp, number-crunching computer where the rest of us have the frontal lobe of our brains. But, boy, he’s as ‘clippable’ as Vinícius.
At this rate, he’ll be the youngest-ever player, by quite a margin, on a Ballon d’Or podium next year — maybe the youngest-ever winner. This year’s has probably come just a tad too soon for the kid who had only just turned 16 when the season started to make the top-three podium. Pity.
Anyway: there are my passionate views. The list is out on Wednesday, and the arguments will continue long, long beyond the winner is announced on Oct. 28. Who’s your money on? Who’s won your heart and, if you had one, who would you vote for?