Ballon d'Or 2018: 5 reasons why Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo not winning is great news

Just one more day. The Ballon d’Or gala takes place tomorrow and the air smells of change. For the last 10 years, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have conquered the event.

Both of these stars won five Ballon d’Or medals each in the last 10 years but this time around, neither of them might. Lionel Messi’s name was pushed out of the potential favourites a long time ago.

The Barcelona star was snubbed from the FIFA Men’s Player of the Year top three and it felt as though he would face the same fate for the Ballon d’Or. While there was somewhat of a chance for Cristiano Ronaldo to scoop up the award given by France Football, it seems like even he is out of the running.

Reports claim that Luka Modric is the favourite to win the award and if that happens, it will be the first time since 2007 that someone not named Messi or Ronaldo would earn the accolade.

This could actually turn out to be great because it could be the…

#5 Beginning of a new era

Everything has to come to an end. Everything. While the bad seems to last forever, the good always ends fast. The reign of the Argentine and the Portuguese ending might be bad news for the pair itself but good news for the others.

It will usher the world of football into a new age where Messi and Ronaldo won’t be the absolute supreme personalities of the game.

Indeed, the Portugal captain is 33 years old now and his Argentine rival is 31, meaning that it is quite impossible for them to regroup and build the foundations for another period of long-term dominance.

The couple could win, at highest, two or three Ballon d’Ors combined, which is nothing compared to their 10-year siege. This means…

#4 Others can hope

‘Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever die,’ Andy Dufresne said famously to Red in The Shawshank Redemption. In the end, it was the hope that won and I am not going to spoil the movie for you and say how.

For the last 10 years, there was a sense of hopelessness among the other players. And how can you blame them? In 2010, Wesley Sneijder won the treble with Inter and then played an instrumental part in helping the Netherlands to the final of the World Cup that year.

In 2013, Franck Ribery won the treble with Bayern Munich and was literally unstoppable on the left flank while also not neglecting his defensive duties.

And yet, somehow, neither of these two men won the Ballon d’Or as Sneijder lost it to Lionel Messi and Ribery lost it to Ronaldo. It filled the air with despair for the others but with neither of the two winning it this year, that will change and lead to…

#3 Collective improvement

Mbappe and Neymar are future Ballon d'Or contenders

Since the hopes of the other players would increase, so will their desire to improve. If they realise that the playing field is even, they would put in everything in order to ensure that they are holding the most prestigious individual honour in the game.

People might say that football is a team sport and individuality has little place in it. However, the Ballon d’Or, no matter how pointless it might be in the context of a team game such as football, is an accolade that every individual aspires to win.

It gives them the tag of being better than the rest: the very best.

So, with that in mind, coupled with the rising hope with the beginning of a new era, players will put in more effort to improve individually; which, in turn, improves a team.

Up until now, they might have had a lingering thought that no matter what they did, Messi or Ronaldo would lift the award.

Not anymore.

#2 Either a midfielder or a non-Real-Barca

Breaking the sequence of this feature, the other reason why Messi or Ronaldo not winning is good is that it also breaks the norm. For the last 11 years – including Kaka’s win – either a forward or a Madrid-Barca player had won the award.

Kaka might be termed as a midfielder but he was always more of a second forward and less of a conventional midfielder. In fact, it has been a very long time since a conventional midfielder won the award.

If Luka Modric wins the Ballon d’Or, it could be argued that he would be the first conventional midfielder since Zidane to win the honour. If he doesn’t and Griezmann or Mbappe wins it, then it would break the Real Madrid-Barcelona streak of 9 years as Cristiano Ronaldo, while playing for Manchester United in 2008, was the last non-Madrid-Barca star to win the Ballon d’Or.

#1 Change is good

Death and change are the only two certainties in life. While we are aware of the concept of death and acknowledge it to be an undeniable fact of life, we find it very hard to come to terms with it.

That is exactly the case for change as well. Everything changes. Change is what caused a single-celled organism to evolve and become the most sophisticated species the world has ever seen.

Change might be seen in a bad light but in most cases, it is good because change will always continue happening.

For 10 years, football fans have had the privilege of witnessing Messi and Ronaldo above and ahead of the rest. But over the last few years, it has gotten boring and, to an extent, excruciating because in the years that others deserved more than the duo, they were still handed the award.

So, this change is good; this will bring in the new dawn and take us back to the beginning.

Edited by Arvind Sriram