Five players who shouldn't have nominated for the 2018 Ballon d'Or

#1 Karim Benzema

Karim Benzema scored just 12 goals last season

This has to be the biggest gaffe in the history of nominations for awards. The 31-year-old has no business being on the list of nominees for the Ballon d’Or, considering his appalling performance for Real Madrid last season.

Benzema has received a lot of criticism for his profligacy in recent years, but he took his poor form to new highs (lows?) last season when he scored a paltry 12 goals in 47 matches across all competitions, with just 5 of those coming in the league.

This makes a mockery of the excellence of the midfield supplying him, and his continuous inclusion in the Real Madrid starting eleven is as criminal as his unmerited nominations for individual awards.

In Real’s Champions League triumph, he was a relative passenger until the semi-final where score two goals to help eliminate Bayern Munich, while his goal in the final came about only because of Karius’s rather comical error, which was after the Frenchman had squandered two glorious chances as usual.

This season, he is once again struggling for form, despite starting the season imperiously with four goals from his first three games, and has now gone seven goals without a goal, which is a key reason why Real Madrid is struggling for goals and form at the moment.

His long running feud with Didier Deschamps and the French football federation meant that he was not a part of the victorious French squad at the World Cup, hence his nomination was undeserved, considering the fact that better performing strikers such as Eden Dzeko, Ciro Immobile and Mauro Icardi were left out.