How Atletico Madrid's Antoine Griezmann Can Secure Top-3 Finish in Ballon d'Or
He’s back, and this time it’s personal.
Well, it’s personal from the point of view that, as Antoine Griezmann starts his preparations for the 2016/17 season at Atletico Madrid’s Ciudad Deportiva training ground this week, the Frenchman will know his efforts over the coming campaign could secure a lasting position among the modern icons.
It’s still all about the team, of course—both the player and his manager Diego Simeone wouldn’t have it any other way—but Euro 2016’s top scorer and best player will know that whatever Atletico achieve this season is going to form the narrative over how he is perceived.
And the questions about whether he can take his summer form into the new season are already on the lips of many.
And for those many, Griezmann’s ongoing success is still something of a surprise.
We’ve known for some time about the footballers who dominate the news agenda in this era, and about which clubs they play for, but despite those teams and players being largely stationed in their own division, both Griezmann and Atletico continue fly in the face of that. Their success is strived for, not sculpted, and seems to fit in with the narrative of the underdog stories we’ve all grown to love.
Put simply, the boy from Burgundy who was dispatched to San Sebastian at an early age wasn’t supposed to be this good.
He wasn’t supposed to be in the conversation when the best players in the world are listed, and he wasn’t supposed to be the top scorer at a European Championship for his country—a nation which had ignored him at senior level until a couple of weeks before his 23rd birthday two-and-a-half years ago.
That he is in that conversation and has achieved those feats has put him in touching distance of world football’s superhumans. This remarkable player of unremarkable stature can now rightly be mentioned alongside the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez, Neymar and the other best forwards in the world.
They seem to have operated on an unattainable plain for a while now, with the notion that they could be caught often being met with ridicule.
But with Griezmann’s summer success has come the real possibility of joining them, and if the 25-year-old can maintain his form into the first few months of the coming season, then he might well be standing next to some of them on the Ballon d’Or podium.
Of course, Ronaldo has surely got the top place on that podium sewn up already.
In a year when Real Madrid won the Champions League and Portugal claimed the European Championship, it would almost be sacrilege not to give it to him, and we all know how these things work. He’ll be grinning that famous grin for a fourth time early next year, and you can’t really argue with that.
Below him, though, the relative failures of Barcelona’s stellar attacking trio on the international stage this year means that Griezmann has a great chance of sealing third or even second place.
"🎶 "You used to call me on my cell phone" 🎶 #Griezmann #FRA #Euro2016 https://t.co/UZT21tHDff
— Bleacher Report UK (@br_uk) July 10, 2016"
Messi suffered more Copa America heartbreak with Argentina—so much so that he vowed never to return—while Suarez had an injury-hit tournament with Uruguay and Neymar didn’t even play in the United States, preferring instead to focus on a Brazilian Olympic campaign which has begun with back-to-back goalless draws against South Africa and Iraq.
All are magnificent footballers, and all have enjoyed that “superhuman” status for a while now, taking all the acclaim and the praise that goes with it. They are the faces staring back at you as a result of their various commercial deals, and they are the names on the backs of replica shirts worldwide.
Griezmann is more of a throwback footballer, both in the sense in which he plays the game and how he has achieved his fame.
A lot of his best work at Euro 2016 came in a somewhat “old-fashioned” way. He was often seen latching on to knockdowns from Olivier Giroud or pulling wide to create space that others could exploit. He was excellent at foraging for chances and popping up in dangerous areas which only became dangerous because of his speed of thought and action.
He’s not going to angrily bullet the ball into the net via his right boot or his head in that way that Ronaldo so often does, nor is going to leave you breathless with a deft piece of skill which takes out four defenders in the mould of Messi—although he is closer in style to the Argentinian than he is the Portuguese.
He is his own player, and you get the sense that everything he’s doing is just an extension of what he used to do in French youth sides or in the academy at Real Sociedad.
If this is to be the season Atletico want it to be, then you get the impression it will also be the season which makes Griezmann as a footballer, and bar actually winning the European Championship, he couldn’t be coming into it in better shape.
Whatever you think of the Ballon d’Or award as a concept—and your writer isn’t a fan—then its use as a barometer for measuring the best cannot be ignored, and that’s why both Ronaldo and Messi have either been No. 1 or No. 2 for seven of the last eight years, and in all of the last five.
The No. 3s in those eight years? Fernando Torres, Xavi (three times), Andres Iniesta, Franck Ribery, Manuel Neuer and Neymar, all of whom made lasting and impressive contributions to the world of football in their respective years, exactly as Griezmann has done in 2016.
He might already have done enough to make it on to the podium, but with so many other gifted players around—not to mention that “superhuman” aspect we’ve discussed above—then he’s got a fine motivation to start the new season as he ended the old one.
If you were Simeone, you’d be whispering that prospect into the Frenchman’s ear almost daily. The Atletico manager knows what Griezmann is capable of, but the fascinating thing is that the player himself might not.
He is still that kid fighting against the odds, and there will be a human desire for redemption following his penalty miss in last season's Champions League final.
So wind him up, let him go, and watch him lead Atletico on another wild ride as they bid to topple their foes both on the domestic scene and in Europe.
Do that, and this player once seen as unremarkable will have secured that spot among the superhumans. And no-one will have worked harder to get there than Griezmann.
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