Didier Drogba Finds Deserved Spot in Time 100

Time Magazine has announced its annual list of the world’s most influential people: The Time 100. Interspersed amongst the Barack Obama, Sonia Sotomayor, Yukio Hatoyama, and Salam Hayyad-esque figures is a soccer player - a real, actual soccer player! - and it’s neither Lionel Messi nor Cristiano Ronaldo.

In truth, Didier Drogba may be a bit out-of-his-depth on this list. But is he any more of a sore thumb than Phil Mickelson or Serena Williams?

To answer my own rhetorical: Yes, he is more of a sore thumb. Even if you knew ahead of time that Time was intent on leveraging the World Cup year and selecting a soccer player for its dalliance in self-importance, Messi was a more-likely choice. Ronaldo was more-likely, and if you had an inkling Time’s selector may go off-the-map, you could have seen Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, or Jozy Altitore be a U.S.-face to the more global World Cup story.

But in the year of a watershed final - the first which will take place in Africa - Time has selected well. If they were hell-bent on exaggerating the global importance of a soccer player, Drogba gives them the most reason to do so.

With apologies to teammate Michael Essien and Internazionale’s Samuel Eto’o, Drogba is the African footballer who has the greatest impact on matches. No player garners more attention from opposing coaches or defenders, and as a result, no player takes more punishment. This has worn Drogba down, leaving the Ivorian in need of surgery, which he will put off until after the EPL season (with Chelsea currently in first place), the FA Cup final (with Chelsea favored in the final), and the World Cup (where Cote d’Ivoire is many’s dark horse favorite). After three months of battling through it, Drogba will likely have hernia surgery.

This season, he has 25 goals in 29 league starts wile adding seven more through FA Cup, League Cup and Champions League. As was the case this weekend when Chelsea beat Stoke 7-0, Drogba can decide a match when not scoring, with his hold-up play and resulting distribution influencing most of the Blues’ goals. The three assists he accumulated on Sunday took him to 10 on the year, a total bested by only three other Premier Leaguers.

The world’s scariest combination of size, speed, and technical proficiency, Drogba may be the best pure athlete in all of team sports. Part of that distinction is the discipline of soccer - with its relative lack of specialization and its unrelenting demands of speed, endurance, and for players like Drogba, strength. Part of that is Drogba’s stature in the game. You would be hard-pressed to honestly name ten players more likely to lead your squad to victory.

Some people choose to look at Drogba as a “diver” or elect to focus on displays like the one at the end of last year’s Champions League semifinal, but if anybody misconstrues that as a reflection on the man off-the-pitch, consider Drogba’s icon status in his homeland is owed as much to his play as his charitable contributions. Whether it be huge donations for hospitals, working to dispel the image of Cote d’Ivoire as a war-torn country, or the other work done through his foundation, Drogba transcends any on-pitch image we’ve constructed - be that image positive or negative.

In that light, Drogba may truly be one of the world’s most influential people. Although, at the beginning of this post, I made light of athletes being considered influential, maybe that’s another image that Drogba transcends. He plays the most popular sport in the world, performing at the top of his profession while being the most visible representative of his country. In that country, his charity work is renown and ongoing, contributing to his iconography. And in this year where the world’s biggest sporting event goes to Africa for the first time, he is that continent’s most recognizable athlete.

How many people are going to come to know Didier Drogba this summer? How many will learn of his proficiency on the pitch and be inspired by his generosity off it? How many will start following soccer, as a result? How many children will put Drogba posters on their walls? How many will develop new (or improved) views of Cote d’Ivoire and Africa?

How many people will Drogba influence?

I go back to my question, asking whether Didier Drogba is out-of-place on a list of the world’s most influential people, and I change my mind. In a world were people look up to athletes, entertainers - icons - and in this year where more people will be looking up to soccer players, Time may have found the world’s most influential athlete.