Ronaldo, Messi & Neuer Are Worthy Finalists, but Ballon d'Or Needs a Rethink
Let's get something straight off the top.
Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Manuel Neuer are not the Ballon d'Or's last bracket of "nominees." They are "finalists" for the world football's most prestigious, individual prize, and the winner has already been decided.
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Voting for the 2014 award concluded on Friday, November 21 (just a day, incidentally, before Messi broke Telmo Zarra's mark to become La Liga's record goalscorer). Once again, the national team managers, their captains and a member of the media from each FIFA constituency were invited to cast ballots, the results of which will be revealed on January 12, 2015.
Their selections—and they have to make three of them in weighted order—will have come from the initial list of 23 players drawn up by FIFA and France Football in late October. That register, and not the one revealed by FIFA on Monday, was the actual catalogue of nominees, and when the voting results are published we'll learn the extent to which the bloated inventory damaged the process.
Quite simply, a 23-man list is an open invitation to brazen partisanship. Players who would never have been mentioned in a serious discussion about the sport's greatest are invited into the process, and their coaches, teammates and media campaigners inevitably oblige.
In 2013, for example, Slovakia captain Martin Skrtel gave his first-place vote to then-Liverpool teammate Luis Suarez (a full breakdown of the voting can be read here). Poland manager Adam Nawalka proclaimed Robert Lewandowski to be the best of the bunch, and Welsh journalist Paul Abbandonato awarded his third-place pick to Gareth Bale.
Shamefully, Wales manager Chris Coleman and captain Ashley Williams wrote Bale's name on their first-place lines, and then there were the handful of media forms, including those of Cambodia, Guatemala and Burkina Faso, that inexplicably omitted both Ronaldo and Messi.
Now, none of this is to say that the 2014 winner won't be worthy of the gong, and compelling cases can be made for Ronaldo and Neuer, in particular.
Ronaldo, who set a single-season goalscoring record in the Champions League while leading Real Madrid to a 10th European Cup and 19th Copa del Rey, was always going to be a finalist. And it was hardly a surprise when Neuer, who backstopped Bayern Munich to a domestic double and Germany to World Cup glory while enhancing a reputation as a "sweeper-keeper," was announced among the trio as well.
According to Sepp Blatter, as per Inside Spanish Football, it was Neuer, and not Messi, who should have won the World Cup's Golden Ball in Brazil last July.
Not that the FIFA president has any business opining on a procedure in which he should be nothing but impartial. Nor does UEFA boss Michel Platini, who just last week asserted, according to AS, that "in a World Cup year the Ballon d'Or should be for a world champion player."
Their remarks only further muddy a process already polluted by favouritism and prejudice.
How the Ballon d'Or winner is determined is in need of a rethink, nevermind the neutrality of football's most powerful administrators.
Reducing the 23 nominees to eight, or even five, would diminish the number of wasted ballots, as the opportunities for bias, club loyalty and basic incompetence wouldn't be nearly as available.
Yes, each of Ronaldo, Messi and Neuer is a justifiable finalist, although next month's result will have at least been partially decided by a defective method.
World football's finest deserve better.
