This Year Will Prove If the Ballon d'Or Truly Is an Individual Award

There's always a certain novelty appeal to the list of Ballon d'Or nominations every year it comes out. The names of European football's great and good are perused to find the odd one out, the name that doesn't quite belong there. This year it was Jamie Vardy, and so the Leicester City striker was the headline pick alongside the usual names.

It's not that Vardy doesn't deserve his nomination. He scored 19 times as the Foxes pulled off the biggest sporting upset of recent times, forcing his way into the England fold for the summer's European Championship.

Vardy, as well as his Algerian team-mate Riyad Mahrez, warrants his place alongside the likes of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

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Seeing Vardy among such company is still somewhat jarring, though, considering his meteoric rise (also considering how he drinks half a bottle of port before every match, per Jack de Menezes of The Independent).

But the Leicester striker's nomination brings up a pertinent point about the Ballon d'Or. 

Is the award a true mark of individual achievement? Would Vardy have made the list had Leicester not won the Premier League title last season? Indeed, it can be difficult to separate the achievements of a team from that of an individual, but the lines are blurred when it comes to the Ballon d'Or. 

This year's Ballon d'Or will provide a gauge of how players are judged in deciding who wins the award. Messi and Ronaldo have performed below their usual stratospheric levels over the past year, but they are still favourites to lift the golden ball. Why? That will become clearer when the results are read out in December. 

Of course, both Messi and Ronaldo have enjoyed successful years in the context of their club and national sides. The former won yet another Liga title with Barcelona, also leading Argentina to the final of the Copa America. The latter won his third Champions League title, while also lifting the European Championship with Portugal in the summer. 

And so if either Messi or Ronaldo win another Ballon d'Or, there will be a case to be made that the prize is not the true individual award it is billed as. Another golden ball for them to hold aloft and they will have surely been recognised for the success of their respective teams rather than their own personal success. 

This is a common phenomenon in football. There is an unwritten expectation that great teams must be defined by one great player.

This happened after Inter Milan's Champions League and treble triumph of 2010, just weeks before an unfancied Netherlands team made it to the 2010 FIFA World Cup final in South Africa. Wesley Sneijder was put forward as the individual fruit of Inter and the Netherlands' labour, despite the fact the playmaker was arguably outshone for both club and country. 

Antoine Griezmann will be the yardstick for the Ballon d'Or this year. There's a case to be made that the Atletico Madrid and France attacker is the best player in the game right now, winning the Liga Player of the Year award on Tuesday. That could prove a watershed moment for this era of football, with it now acceptable to claim someone other than Messi or Ronaldo as the best. 

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Yet Griezmann will turn up at the Ballon d'Or ceremony on January 9 with not one piece of silverware to show for his individual success in 2016. Atletico Madrid fell just short in their attempts to win La Liga and the Champions League, and France lost out in the final of Euro 2016.

In a way, Griezmann's tale over the past year has been one of tragic oh-so-nears, but that shouldn't detract from his individual brilliance.

Whether the Ballon d'Or should exist at all is a debate in itself. The tribulations in deciding who should be eligible for the award is illustrative of that. Football is so fundamentally dependent on the strength of the team over the individual that it's difficult to determine one part as being more important than the other, at least when it comes to handing out awards on such a basis.

Changes have been made to the award for this year, with FIFA's association with the Ballon d'Or coming to an end. It is once again an award voted for by journalists only, and so the hope is that perhaps an additional degree of logic will be applied, that the politicking of recent years will no longer be a factor. 

No longer will the shortlist be whittled down to just three finalists. That was a format that turned the voting process into a popularity contest, with captains and coaches picking Messi or Ronaldo with the tribalism music fans picked Oasis or Blur at the height of 1990s Britpop. These changes should at least make an improvement, although the fundamental premise of the award remains flawed. 

And yet the Ballon d'Or exploits an underlying urge that all football fans possess. That urge is the one that sparks debate among friends in the pub and keeps football forums harvesting the clicks. We can't help but compare players, posing that one is better than the other, lambasting another player for being nowhere near as good as someone else. 

Even computer games rank players on the basis of their individual qualities. The Ballon d'Or is the ultimate manifestation of this guilty pleasure, and it's for this reason that it will most likely remain a heralded—if somewhat confusing and contradictory—part of football for a long time to come. We must learn to live with the award's inconsistencies because these are the inconsistencies football is played with. 

Messi and Ronaldo's duopoly of the Ballon d'Or over the past eight years has been justified. One or the other has been the best player in the world at any given time over that spell.

For the first time in a long while, though, the award handed to the greatest might not be a simple choice between the two. Whether they win another Ballon d'Or or not will say a lot about football's famous golden boy.