Covering all facets to determine the winner of the Ballon d'Or

The Ballon d’Or nominees – Lionel Messi (L), Manuel Neuer (C) and Cristiano Ronaldo

Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Manuel Neuer have been nominated for the Ballon d’Or. Everyone is busy making cases for their favourite stars. Let us take an alternate route and try to come up with the best candidate for the accolade.

The Golden Riddle

Our mortal lives march into maturity second after second, but the monotony of it is broken down by all the mysteries and riddles surrounding us. Debate is the usual medium for resolving these riddles as the theories emerge from experts and armchair analysts alike and the thin line between facts and opinions starts to blur. Politics, Science, Entertainment have all had their clashing sets of supporters, loyalists and fans but somehow over eons of arguments and altercations, sanity and agreement prevail.

However, concurrence among fans of sports teams and superstar athletes will never find the light of day. One of the most prime examples of such an irreconcilable debate is the one see-sawing between the greatness of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. In my humble yet rational opinion, one of these names is light-minutes ahead when it comes to overall greatness, but that discussion is for another time and this article is about a riddle involving three nominees for the most coveted individual prize in the world of football.

The author’s intent – Don’t remember the number

Annually FIFA presents an award for the most outstanding player of the year and calls it the Ballon D’Or which gets transliterated into The Golden Ball. The past few years have been dominated by the two aforementioned names and this time too Messi and Ronaldo make it to the top 3 nominations alongside a World Cup winner in Manuel Neuer.

As we enter the fag end of every year, the football fraternity engages in a vehement discussion over who deserves the award and this year has been no exception. I would like to break away from that tradition of quoting statistics and exhibiting fanaticism to choose the rightful owner of the prize. Instead, I believe this article would pique a lot of keenness among readers if we took a different route and ponder from an economic, philosophical and behavioral standpoint.

The origin of sports – Are you entertained?

Ever since the days of the Roman Empire, the Kings, his subjects, and the civilians needed a source of entertainment and they turned to their down-trodden slaves to do the brutal and gory killing for that. Soon these gladiators elevated themselves to heroes and had followers all over the empire.

With the passage of time athletes were idolized as demi-gods. Such celebration and worship could inspire young minds out of poverty and disdain, but I believe somewhere along the line the whole plot of this concept got lost. We all disremembered the true purpose of sports and got our minds intertwined with the commoditization of it in the whacky world of marketing and finance. Books and movies on sports were made to inculcate virtues like sacrifice, resilience and so on.

The curse is cast by media which always wants to celebrate a hero and a superstar. Just track the sporting pages of football and what the editors write about strikers when they see a drop in goals. For all we know they would have made more assists or just led like a leader on the field.

During the opening couple of months, Messi was targeted by the media and lambasted for scoring fewer goals although he had the maximum number of assists in La Liga. Suddenly 3 hat-tricks in 4 games meant now that the journalists again woke up to the idea that Leo was the greatest. If you are looking for a word to describe this, it is “shallow”. All this achieves is making avid children falsely believe in individualism.

Choosing the best – Unnatural Selection

Even a toddler understands that the staple objective in sports, team or individual, is winning. The opposing constraint to this objective is the adversary, and while individual sports like Tennis leave it all to one, team sports are blessed with camaraderie and togetherness. Even some of the most clichéd maxims which we all use in real life scenarios like “There is no I in team”, “All for one, one for all” have all originated in the verandahs of such sporting events.

Fabio Cannavaro won the award in 2006 after he led Italy to the World Cup in 2006. Though he had no brilliant goals or assists to remember his performance by, he was the skipper of a team that boasted a solid defensive line which helped them lift the cup. The decision to hand over the award was one of fairness, while fanfare was placed on a backburner. However, shock and awe struck the world of football when Messi took the prize in 2011 and Ronaldo in 2013 without any major trophies to their names while there were heroes like Iniesta and Sneijder who were left in the lurch.

Like the Great Emperor in the movie “The Gladiator” says to Joaquin Phoenix, “Your failure as a son, is my failure as a father”. Similarly, when a team fails, it has to be attributed to everyone in the team and to a greater extent on the so-called “superstar” in the team.

Neuer recently commented that he might not win the award because he does not score as many goals as Ronaldo and Messi. This is lamentable as the world of football now focuses on just goals rather than effective contribution, assists, tackles etc all that lead to the team’s ultimate victory. ‘Glamour over gallantry’ has become the mantra in sports today and this mentality has to go through a 180 degree transformation if children taking up the sport are ever going to achieve their dreams and safeguard the sanctity of sportsmanship.

Without a figment of doubt Messi and Ronaldo are two of the most passionate and hardworking footballers and they never tire of working for the team but calling them “the Best in the World” when they fail to inspire 10 others around them is illogical. Manuel Neuer has led a team which had no geniuses, yet proved to be an unstoppable juggernaut and won the World Cup after a gap of 24 years, that too in Latin America, which no European team has ever achieved before.

Conversation about the converse

Now I do fathom the counter-argument to my point of view, where fans could claim that a solid individual performance and ability should not be punished for the shortcomings of the team. Cricket fans know that Brian Lara was one of the greatest batsmen to have played the game, but he holds a distinct record of being part of the losing side in most test matches in the history. So is it fair if Lara’s prowess is disregarded just because the West Indian cricket team was utterly spineless?

In the world of football, a similar example exists, where the supremely blessed George Best, never got to play in a World Cup and earn fame because his country, Northern Ireland, boasted of no other footballing talent. Messi and Ronaldo have single-handedly taken their teams to the pinnacle often, and hence should not be ridiculed or be held accountable when their teams go trophyless.

There is also the theory of the “invisible hand” or should I say feet, which was proposed by the great economist Adam Smith, who said every time we do an act selfishly, an invisible hand tends to convert that act into some benefit for the society. So every goal these footballers score does put the team at a better position whether they intend it or not.

Michael Jordan was arguably the greatest athlete in all sports, but he had a certain arrogance about him. He once countered his high school coach and said “There is no I in team, but there is I in Win”. Nobody can belittle his abilities or achievements as an individual, but all his stardom and following came from the successes he brought for the Chicago Bulls.

What matters is the team huddle, not shining alone in the puddle

This riddle is not going to find a solution anytime soon, but I honestly believe that the world today is deranged and deprave, and the only hope for our future generations is the belief in selflessness. So let the people in-charge reward individuals who can employ their abilities for the uprising of all brethren around them, and not just the self.

As they say in the world of football, “The name on the front of the shirt, is always more important than the one on the back”. If one follows how the Nobel Prize awarded each year, say in the field of economics, only the economist whose work has a proven seminal effect on a real world problem, gets the ultimate recognition. Several other popular and brilliant economists are waiting for their turn, but they can rest assured that it will only come when their theory can make the jump to practical efficacy.

To end this article I would like to quote the instance from the movie “A beautiful mind”, where Professor John Nash reinvents Game theory and proves that for a team to maximize its result, it’s not just enough if every player just did what is best for himself, but also simultaneously did what is best for the group. Hopefully, FIFA will develop the necessary acumen to choose that player who inspired a group and a nation, and not just glorified his own resume.