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FIFA's "Best" awards have been awarded and we have a new best Men’s player. While Marta has won the Women’s award before (5 times), Luka Modric has broken the dominance of Ronaldo and Messi finally. His win comes on the back of his UEFA Best Player award and with Ballon d'Or (given by French Press) scheduled for December, we are well into the season of awards.
For some, it marks an end of an era, a 10-year duopoly of Messi and Ronaldo. But much like the namesake WWE showdown between The Undertaker and Triple HHH, it is more an advertising gimmick than an actual epochal change.
Among other foibles of the night of decadence was the fact that Mohamed Salah was declared the third best player in World but could not pass muster for the best 11 of the World team. The Puskas Award for the best goal was awarded to Salah, another criminal dispensation when you consider the other contenders. Clearly, the Liverpool fans and keyboard warriors took the war to the poll.
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Cristiano Ronaldo's agent, Jorge Mendes decried foul play when Modric won the UEFA best player award and there was a conspicuous absence of the player at the ceremony.
For the FIFA ceremony, both Messi and Ronaldo were missing.
It’s a team game
The game of football has dynamic equations with variables, technical, tactical, psychological and physical. More important than all of them is the cohesion or the collective identity of eleven individuals. It is not about one man.
The sheer vanity of the ceremony is an exercise of worshipping the culture of commerce and individualism. In fact, it is not even that because if the list of three best players the World does not include Messi then footballing talent and performance is not the bedrock of such accreditation.
In the age of celebrity player and social media superstar, the game is often an afterthought. All the razzmatazz, all the glitz and glamour, all the sash and flash, all the splendour and grandeur cannot redeem the epistemic invalidity of the sole crusader when it is the team that wins together.
Every match is a trade-off between attack and defence. Even for a good counter-attacking team, they require a defensive stronghold. For possession-based play, you need pressing from the front, with attackers become first defenders. There are so many interdependent factors that no one factor can overwhelm the entire web of events in a football match.
The dominant side was the perfect example of a harmonious collective where the individual asserted the common trait and objective. It was Barcelona without Messi and Real Madrid without Ronaldo that dominated World football and changed the modern football textbook.
The German side that humbled Messi's Argentina in 2010 was brushed aside by the aggregated strength of the Spanish team.
The curious case of Leo Messi
This is first time in a decade when Messi did not make the top 3 in these awards. Arguably the greatest player of his time, Lionel Messi has time and again failed to deliver his magic for Argentina; the same was true in last summer’s World Cup. The fact is that a well drilled and compact French side wiped the grass with Messi and Co. in their match. The same happened in South Africa when a flamboyant German side beat them in South Africa. Clearly, the total is greater than the sum of its parts and certainly one individual part, no matter how shiny and expensive.
On the other side, an extraordinary syncretism at Barcelona provides Messi the canvass to enhance his artistic endeavors. Barcelona, a team, is where every cog gets its due recognition as the collective produces victories and championships.
Five-time Ballon d'Or winner Lionel Messi has always maintained supreme levels of team ethic and his reluctance regarding individual awards is a byproduct of a desire to win as a team. Winning championships and tournaments is what makes history, winning individual trophies makes the advertisements.
The
ideography
of the awards
In a way, the individual awards are a product of popularity and clever marketing. They do not subsist on any scientific analyses or intelligent design. They are at the best-tinted lens with vested interests having a panoply of chromes.
In all honesty, the words "the best"is polysemic in nature. The interpretations are myriad and the appropriation of those meanings is what Celeste Condit says is poly-variant. Understandably, this incorporated our own biases and emotional proclivities like Manuel Neuer opting for Toni Kroos, Robert Lewandowski and Arturo Vidal in his three nominations.
I am sure if allowed, Ronaldo would put his name in all the three places. He certainly would not pick Messi which apparently he did not. Messi, however, had his arch-nemesis in the third spot.
The Ballon d'Or is determined by journalists who can hardly be vouchsafed as custodian of immune oversight. "The FIFA award" is voted on by national team captains, national team coaches and journalists. Add to them the fans' vote with online registration and vote. We all know, especially the troll kings of powers in India, how reliant the online vote is with the all the bots etc.
The diverse strokes of diverse folks who judge diverse attributes produce highly subjective results. I mean in terms of pure ability Modric is nowhere near Messi. He may be more aesthetic than Ronaldo but he does not win matches even half as much as the Portuguese.
Sometimes it is just about winning trophies. But given the fact that Sergio Ramos arm dragged Mohamed Salah out of the final of Champions League must arrogate some credit to the win. Without the unfortunate injury, we might have a Liverpool player with the accolade. He certainly had a stellar club season than Modric.
Arguably, Perisic had a better World Cup than Modric and certainly much better semi-final and final.
With the glory of scoring of goals almost guaranteed to grab headlines, ink unforgettable memories and cloud intellectual breakdown of the games themselves, Modric’s accomplishment is refreshing but hardly important or significant to the game itself.
I do not suggest that it derogates his success but only highlights the inane indulgence with the individual. After all, he will never be as popular or get as many Twitter or Facebook followers as Ronaldo or Messi.
As a corollary, individually, I doubt that Messi and Ronaldo (with 5 awards each) have had five times the impact and brilliance of Maradona and Pele who have a combined haul of one shared award( the Player of the Century award- popular votes went to Maradona while journalist and coaches voted for Pele).
It is democratic but even democracy seldom appreciates merit with equivalence. The general elections of the likes in India and the USA have certainly given enough evidence to suggest otherwise, even if the arena is far greener and manifest in football than politics.
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