- Image Credit: REUTERS
- Lionel Messi of Argentina, FIFA World Player of the Year 2012 holds his FIFA Ballon d'Or trophy during the FIFA Ballon d'Or 2012 soccer awards ceremony at the Kongresshaus in Zurich January 7, 2013.
Zurich: Another record gone. Lionel Messi finished 2012 on 91 goals in 69 games. He began 2013 by winning the Fifa Ballon d’Or. It is the fourth time he has won the award; no one else has won it so often. Because the award is a merger of the old European Footballer of the Year and the Fifa World Player of the Year which was inaugurated only in 1991, Diego Maradona never won it and nor did Pele but it is doubtful even they would have matched Messi’s achievement. Marco van Basten won the European award three times in five years, Johan Cruyff three in four and Platini three years in a row. Alfredo Di Stfano won it twice. Messi has superseded all of them.
Months of speculation slowly gave way to a growing realisation, especially as the European Championship was left behind and Messi accelerated towards the end of the year: it was going to be him again. He scored twice in eight successive games and they were almost all goals of barely plausible brilliance; when he scored only once in his final game of 2012, it was as if he had underachieved. On Monday night, finally it was confirmed. “The good thing about the Ballon d’Or is that it’s being handed out tomorrow,” the Barcelona coach, Tito Vilanova, had said the night before. Everyone could get on with their lives, talk about something else for a change.
Hardly: first there will be the reaction and then it will not be long before talk turns to next year’s award. Except that right now it is hard to imagine anyone else walking away a winner from Zurich in 12 months’ time; 2012, like 2010, was an opportunity for others. But Messi swept all before him again. All the excitement, all the debates, all the headlines. The same winner
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