How FIFA turned The Best Awards into The Worst

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The Best awards night is FIFA’s annual showpiece event that sees big awards handed out.

This was the third time the event had been held and yes, all the glitz and the glamour was very much on display but watching the broadcast, one couldn’t help but think that FIFA had dropped the ball when it came to the actual awards.

Of course, they dropped the ball when it came to the overall show, glitzy though the presentation may have been, the content was awful. The material written for host Idris Elba to deliver was so achingly bad that it managed to make one of the most charismatic people on planet earth look like a physical manifestation of the Boring Milner twitter account.

Big Shaq opened the show, which was weird as he’s a comedian, not a musician. And then there’s the fact that had Noel Gallagher, a man who hasn’t been relevant as a pop culture icon since the turn of the century was performing live. A desperate olive branch from FIFA to that crowd of football obsessives who grew up on Football Italia that, hey, this show caters for you lot who came of age in the 90’s too!

But all of that nonsense could have been overlooked. After all, it’s kind of par for the course with individual awards that the events themselves will be cheeseball nonsense, so it could have been forgiven if the actual awards were good*. But they weren’t. At all. Here’s how FIFA turned The Best awards into The Worst.

*individual awards in a team sport are inherently a silly concept, so all criticism of these awards should be understood through that lens.

Leo Messi came fifth in the men’s voting

Leo Messi is the best player on the planet, so the idea that he didn’t even make the podium for an award called “The Best” is patently absurd. Frankly if the award was about, y’know, which player is actually the best then with the exception of 2013, Messi would take every individual award every year since 2009.

But the award is about more than that, so alright, Luka Modric is a deserving winner for his sensational influence over both Croatia and Real Madrid’s immense successes. That’s fair and makes sense. Messi finishing fifth, however? That is outright bonkers and displays a severe problem with the players, coaches and journalists voting for this award.

Either the criteria need to be more clearly explained or the whole voting system needs to change, because any award for individual excellence in football that doesn’t place Leo Messi at least in the top three (allowing for one or two exceptional individual seasons to briefly thrust some above him), especially after a season where he individually played 37 league games with Barcelona without losing a single one, is a joke.

Marta won the women’s award

Everyone loves Marta, she’s basically the greatest woman’s player of all-time, but her winning this award was a joke. This demonstrates the flaws of letting basically everyone vote for these things because many captains and coaches of smaller nations (and the vast majority of FIFA is smaller nations – how do you think cronyism spread like wildfire?) don’t have the time, nor access to media, to make an informed decision.

So what happens is most of them end up voting for the biggest name. That’s why Marta, who very much had a down year winning only the Copa América Femenina, ended up winning The Best women’s award even though Wolfsburg’s Pernille Harder (who is miles ahead if you look at votes from just the top 25 nations) or the sensational Ada Hegerberg were better.

Hegerberg can feel particularly aggrieved because her 15 goals helped blast Lyon to a third consecutive Women’s Champions League and she bagged 28 to fire Lyon to a fourth consecutive Division 1 Féminine. She’s the Cristiano Ronaldo of the woman’s game except even better because she’s 23 years old and dominates both domestically and continentally, yet she finished third and had to watch Marta win it.

World XI issues

There were just so many things wrong with the FIFPro World XI that we decided to group them into one category. This XI is usually something of a farce because it’s voted on by players from different nationalities with no clear set rule on criteria, but this year it was especially wacky.

The Best goalkeeper absent?

An expert panel of former goalkeepers and strikers got together and decided to crown Thibaut Courtois The Best FIFA Goalkeeper. Fair enough, you might say, he had a great World Cup. But the authority of this decision is undermined by his fellow professionals electing to put David De Gea in goal for the FIFPro World XI.

Dani Alves’ presence?

Dani Alves has, bar a four month run of form for Juventus at the start of 2017, been kind of a disaster since leaving Barcelona. Age is catching up with him and injuries keep on sidelining him. He’s not a relevant force in the game anymore (though he is a great follow on social media, just hoping he doesn’t endorse a fascist anytime soon) but because he’s cool and fun, his peers voted him into this XI ahead of at least half a dozen more deserving candidates.

Eden Hazard a midfielder?

Who decides which players go in what position bracket? Because the idea that Eden Hazard is a “midfielder” and as such eligible to play in a midfield three is the kind of thing only tactical dreamers on social media would think of as something worth trying. Hazard may love to pass but he is and has always been a wing-forward, thriving on the front lines of his sides.

Salah top three but not here?

Mohamed Salah is apparently one of the three Best players in the world, as voted by journalists, fans, players, etc. – but when it came to purely a peer vote then the excellent Egyptian missed out on a spot in the World XI. This is probably the one thing where players have accidentally made the correct decision, albeit probably because they just saw the name “Messi” and their brain’s pleasure centres starting ringing like workplace fire alarms.

No acknowledgement for Manchester City’s record breakers

Manchester City were arguably the best team in the world last season. They cruised to a spectacular 100 point Premier League triumph playing magnificent football. But for a bad game and a half against Liverpool, they would probably have ended their season with the Champions League trophy as well.

Yet when it came to awards night, the City boys are nowhere to be seen. Not in the FIFPro XI and barely in the voting for the best. Hell, Kevin De Bruyne, City and the Premier League’s best player, whose club season vastly outstripped Luka Modric’s in terms of consistency of excellence and whose World Cup was equally impressive (he, like Modric, was rubbish against France) ended up coming 8th in the voting with just 3.54% of the vote whilst Modric got 29.05% – that is absurd.

The Puskas Award is a joke

Everyone loves a worldie but something has to be done about the Puskas award. Getting fans to vote on it is always a tricky prospect because fan votes can be warped by an energetic fanbase gaming the system. This isn’t quite Cambridge Analytica helping unleash Brexit and Trump, but the last two Puskas awards have gone to players who represent some stark raving mad fanbases.

Olivier Giroud won last year, and we all know what Arsenal fans are like with online polls. But at least Giroud’s goal was genuinely miraculous. This year Mohamed Salah won for a fairly routine goal; hell, James Milner even joked about it, and when you’re getting roasted by James Milner you know something has gone way the hell wrong.

In truth, the award was a testament to the voting power and intense myopia of Liverpool fans and particularly the Egyptian people. But the fact that such a mundane goal won the day ahead of literally the picture perfect bicycle kick or Benjamin Pavard’s Arc de Triomphe that basically is the reason France won the World Cup is, like the rest of The Best, just the worst.

The post How FIFA turned The Best Awards into The Worst appeared first on Squawka News.



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