We're approaching the sharp end of the awards season, and the race for the FIFA Ballon d'Or is getting a little bit spicy. A few days ago, UEFA president Michael Platini — himself a three-time Golden Balloon recipient — told the world that, in his ever so humble tone, the winner should come from Germany's World Cup winning squad. "Many players deserve the Ballon d'Or, but I am of the opinion that the accolade in a World Cup year should go to a World Cup winner."
When it comes to the FIFA Ballon d’Or, does the World Cup really matter?
If Cristiano Ronaldo wins the 2014 FIFA Ballon d’Or, he’ll do so having flopped at the World Cup. Are there any precedents for a player to take the prize without having played well at that tournament?
Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
Real Madrid took umbrage to this, retorting with a statement that read, in summary, "Butt out, Michel, Ronaldo's amazing and really handsome and scored loads and loads of goals. Is that right, Cristiano? Should we mention your charitable work?" Then, yesterday, the final three-man shortlist was announced. And who's that alongside the inevitable Ronaldo and equally inevitable Lionel Messi? Why, it's World Cup winning goalkeeper Manuel Neuer. What fun.
Is Platini right? Should winning (or, if not winning, then tearing up) a World Cup count for more than, say, scoring a stupid amount of domestic goals and winning a remarkable amount of domestic trophies? It’s a question of taste. But it’s also a question of history: how many of the 14 (or 16; more on this later) previous winners have been honored for their World Cup achievements? Are there any precedents for a Ronaldo-style victory?
Before we get into that, some housekeeping. The Ballon d’Or began in 1956, when French magazine France Football instituted an award for European footballers playing with European clubs, as voted for by European journalists. This arrangement ambled along until the editors noticed, in 199-flipping-5, that there were a few South Americans and Africans playing quite well in Europe. So the eligibility criteria were expanded in 1995 to include non-Europeans playing in Europe, and then again in 2007 to include anybody playing anywhere.
Meanwhile, in 1991, FIFA instituted the World Player of the Year award, which could be won by anybody playing anywhere in the world and was voted for by the captains and coaches of international teams. Both awards ran side by side until 2010, when they merged to create the FIFA Ballon d’Or (the World Player of the Year, by the by, is still awarded in the women’s game).
So let's break this down. Of the 13 World Cups held between 1958 and 2006 — the first and last held within the lifetime of the old Ballon d'Or — six were won by European teams. Five of the Ballons d'Or awarded in those years went to (perhaps arguably, perhaps not) the best player from that team: England's Bobby Charlton in 1966, Italy's Paolo Rossi in 1982, Germany's Lothar Matthäus in 1990, France's Zinedine Zidane in 1992, and Italy's Fabio Cannavaro in 2006.
As for the other year, well, while Germany won the World Cup in 1974, the Ballon d'Or went to Johan Cruyff. While this might not have been entirely down to his role as captain and heartbeat of a wonderful Netherlands side — he was coming into the tournament off the back of a league title with Barcelona — the significance of the World Cup to the award can be seen in the voting patterns rather than the result.
For in second place was Franz Beckenbauer, the opposing captain. Voting was carried out in preference order: a first-preference vote was worth five points, a second-preference vote was worth four, and so on down to fifth-preference. Cruyff came first with 15 first-preference votes and a total of 116 points; Beckenbauer came second with ten first-preference votes and 105 points. That’s more than any other runner-up managed until 1994, when France Football expanded the voting panel; that’s more than most winners over the same period. And Beckenbauer, if we’re comparing domestic seasons, had outdone Cruyff, picking up a Bundesliga and European Cup double. That he finished second to Cruyff does rather suggest that the compelling summertime story of the Netherlands, of total football, and of their oh-so-close second place had carried the day.
The 2002 World Cup took place after the eligibility criteria had been extended to includes non-Europeans, and Ronaldo won the Ballon d'Or for his redemptive goalscoring and terrible haircut on the way to Brazil's victory. But what of those World Cups that were held in the lifetime of the old Ballon d'Or, yet were won by non-European sides (and thus non-eligible players)? We've six in total: Brazil's victories in 1958, 1962, 1970 and 1994, and Argentina's in 1978 and 1986.
Despite the lack of a European champion, at least two of these Ballons d'Or seem to be awarded almost entirely on the basis of performances at the World Cup. In 1962, legendary Czechoslovakian midfielder Josep Masopust took the gong after leading his nation to the final, which they lost to a Garrincha-inspired Brazil; his greatest season with Dukla Prague had come the year before, as they reached the semi-finals of the 1966-67 European Cup. And in 1970, Gerd Müller scored 10 goals for Germany as they finished third in Mexico, even though the German Footballer of the Year for the same year was Hamburg's Uwe Seeler.
Three more appear to have been down to World Cup in part, if not perhaps in total. First, we rewind all the way to 1958. French genius Raymond Kopa's 1957-58 had been an exemplary one at club level, winning a second consecutive league and European Cup double with Real Madrid. But he had also had an outstanding World Cup. France finished third in Sweden, but they outscored the rest of the planet by some distance, notching a fairly impressive 23 goals in six games.
A record-breaking 13 of those went to Just Fontaine, the striker gorging himself on Kopa’s silver service, but the playmaker managed to pick up three for himself, and the Times of the day identified him as the inspiration behind France’s progress through the tournament. Had captain Robert Jonquet not broken his leg half an hour into the semi-final — no substitutes back then — Kopa could well have got his hands on the Jules Rimet; as it is, he had to settle for the Golden Balloon.
Secondly, in 1985-86, Ukrainian midfielder Igor Belanov joint-top scored for Dynamo Kyiv as they won the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup. Then, come the summer, he scored four as the Soviet Union reached the last 16 in Mexico (the best of which is below). While neither might amount to an inarguable case for the Gilded Orb, When Saturday Comes notes that the feeling at the time — including that of Belanov himself — was that this was “really for the team(s) as a whole”, recognition for the futuristic football of Valeri Lobanovski, who coached both sides. Also, this was 1986, “a year when football was Maradona,” yet Maradona wasn’t eligible for football’s highest individual award.
The last of our half-and-halfers came in 1994, as the brilliant Hristo Stoichkov capped off a pretty impressive season with Barcelona — a league title and a run to the final of the European Cup — with a series of magnificent performances in Bulgaria’s run to fourth place in the USA World Cup. Second and third place, as it goes, went to Roberto Baggio and Paolo Maldini respectively, respectively the heart and spine of the Italy side that lost in the final to Brazil.
Indeed, there is only one World Cup-year Ballon d’Or that cannot have been influenced by the World Cup in any sense, and that’s Kevin Keegan’s win in 1978. We can safely say that this had nothing to do with England’s performances at the World Cup in Argentina ... because England didn’t qualify for the World Cup in Argentina.
However, there is still some evidence of World Cup centrality in the voting. Keegan won the award the following year as well, and while his second season for Hamburg was notably superior to his first — they finished 10th in his first campaign; they won the title in his second — it’s still striking how much more emphatic his victory was in that second award. In 1979, Keegan picked up 18 of the 26 first-preference votes and finished with a score of 118 points, 66 points ahead of Bayern Munich’s Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. But in 1978, he took only nine first-preference votes, and finished just six points ahead of Austrian Hans Krankl.
Though Krankl had top-scored in the Austrian Bundesliga in 1978, earning himself a move to Barcelona in the process, that itself doesn't amount to much of a case for the Ballon d'Or. However, Austria had caused a bit of a splash in Argentina, and Krankl had been at the heart of things. They opened their tournament with a victory over Spain and went on to win the first group stage ahead of Brazil in second. And they closed it with a remarkable 3-2 win over Germany known, depending on which side of the Austro-German border you find yourself, as either the Miracle or the Disgrace of Córdoba. It was Austria's first win over Germany since the end of the Second World War, and it is perhaps best remembered for this magnificent moment of commentary.
(That’s “Tor! Tor! Tor! Tor! Tor! Tor! I wer’ narrisch!” or “Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal! I’m going crazy!” He went on to add “Ladies and gentlemen, we are hugging each other here ... we’re kissing each other ... perhaps we can pour ourselves a small celebratory glass of wine.”)
So while we know that Keegan’s 1978 award had nothing to do with the World Cup and everything to do* with the 12 goals he scored for Hamburg in the league, the competition he was facing was still very much World Cup inflected; indeed, he nearly missed out on the thing altogether. That Krankl goal, incidentally, meant little in the wider scheme of things for Austria; they were on the way home no matter the result. It did, however, eliminate their neighbours. Some reports even have it that Germany had jumped on the same flight back to Europe. Awkward.
* Perhaps not everything. Ballon d’Or voting has, in the past, been an odd thing, and there is a theory held by some that the continental journalists who made up the majority of the electorate simply had, at around this time, very little interest in footballers based in England. More on that here.
What of the Ballon d’Or’s junior partner, the other half of the merger? The old FIFA World Player of the Year was established in 1991 and was awarded in four World Cup years. In each case, with a certain amount of predictability, it went to (again, perhaps arguably) the best player on the winning side: Romário in 1994 (Stoichkov was in second), Zidane in 1998, Ronaldo in 2002 and Cannavaro in 2006.
All of which adds up to one thing. Only two players have ever won the big individual prize in a World Cup year without at least doing something spectacular at the biggest tournament of the lot. Kevin Keegan is one; the other, in 2010 after the merger, is Lionel Messi.
In short: the World Cup has always been exceptionally significant when it comes to these individual awards. Yet Cristiano Ronaldo is the favorite to win this particular edition, which would mark the second occasion in a row that the bauble has gone to a player on the back of an average-at-best World Cup. Two points isn’t a trend, but could it be the start of one? Another sign that club football is clawing its way past the international game, and establishing itself at the pinnacle of the sport. Is it, perhaps, more important to win the European Cup than the World Cup? Have we, or have they, broken football at last?
Perhaps. Though it’s worth noting that both the 2010 and 2014 World Cup winners, Spain and Germany, triumphed less through the efforts of any one or two individuals but much more as a team. They had no Maradona or Garrincha dragging them through, and it’s instructive to note that while Messi won the Ballon d’Or in 2010 — and he was brilliant that season, as he was the one before and two after — five of the top 10 below him came from the victorious Spanish squad. The team that tiki-takas its way to victory does so together, and you can’t give an award to a pass completion percentage.
Similarly, while Germany have some magnificent footballers, it’s hard to put your finger on one individual and say: this main is the reason they won. (Except, perhaps, Shkodran Mustafi.) If Miroslav Klose had scored 13 goals on the way to the trophy, or if Per Mertesacker had catenaccio-ed his way through the occasion, then Ronaldo might not be favourite. As it is, the job of picking an outstanding individual from that Germany team comes down to “well, probably not Lukas Podolski.”
It’s still possible, of course, for either Messi or Neuer to win, and a victory for either would be an affirmation of the World Cup’s importance. Neuer, who also had an outstanding season for Bayern, was excellent throughout Brazil, teetering on the edge of disaster yet always managing, just about, to avoid getting sent off for nearly killing a man in the final make his tackles. And as for Messi, while he’s not had a banner year by his own ludicrous standards, he did walk away from the final with the Player of the Tournament award.
Whereas all Ronaldo took from the tournament was a scowl, an injured thigh, and an all-consuming need to win another, different shiny golden globe. His club, mindful of his tender ministrations that ego and drive require, have been telling everybody who will listen that the World Cup might have been fun, but doesn’t really matter all that much. Goalscoring records and European Cups are what matters, not the precedents of history. Next January, we get to find out if the world’s football captains, coaches and journalists agree.
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