Osman Samiuddin
Admit it. The only way the Ballon d’Or could actually be worth watching is if it became incumbent upon the previous year’s winner to hand the prize to the new winner.
Disclaimer: I did not watch the ceremony this year. I did not watch it last year either. Or the year before that. Or, in fact, have I watched it ever.
A high concentration of cringeworthy moments interspersed with periods of potentially extreme ennui (‘What are you wearing this year Neymar?’ asked no one) is reason enough to avoid them.
Lately, too, they have been rendered more pointless by dint of their predictability.
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All awards work towards predictability. That is why they work. That is not to say they are always wrong.
Nobody can convincingly argue that Lionel Messi was not the best player in the world this year, or that he and Ronaldo have been undeserving winners every year since 2008 (although last year, Manuel Neuer would have been both a radical but also justifiable choice).
But that is the point of not needing to tune in to know that Messi would win it. The only reason I would have tuned in was if last year’s winner was handing him the award, and not, as actually happened, Kaka.
In 2008, at the Fifa Player of the Year award – which is what the original Ballon d’Or has now merged with – Pele handed the award to Ronaldo. The next year Michel Platini and Sepp Blatter gave it to Messi.
In 2010, when Messi won it again, Pep Guardiola, appropriately enough, handed him the trophy. In 2011, it was Platini and Blatter again who presented the trophy.
And actually, I would have watched it this year if Platini and Blatter had appeared on stage, as if the ending to a horror film – “Surprise! It was all a dream!”
Watching their chumminess and bonhomie on stage in 2011 now is occasion for much laughter.
Since then, Fabio Cannavaro, Pele again, Thierry Henry and Kaka have been on stage as the necessary bits of decoration when the best player in the world is anointed.
But imagine Ronaldo handing it to Messi this year? Or Messi doing likewise to Ronaldo in 2013? Now that would have been a picture to really break the internet. Conveniently, it is one logistical too far.
If last year’s winner is a nominee for this year, then to have him on stage as he loses out and simultaneously hands over an award to his archrival, then that is a level of awkwardness that even glitzy award ceremonies should shy away from.
Even if, as Ronaldo has said in the new eponymously titled documentary about him, that he has started seeing Messi “as a person, not a rival”.
If things have improved between the two then that memo has not gone public. Though, it must be said that in the awards photo in which Ronaldo is shaking his arch-person’s girlfriend’s hand, the pair of them look pretty relaxed, and it is Neymar who looks most put out.
Hours after Messi won, unknowns vandalised a statue of Ronaldo on his home island of Madeira, painting in Messi’s name and shirt number on the back (you know somewhere Zlatan Ibrahimovic is rueing a missed opportunity to paint his own name there).
Though it was quickly removed, that must have stung. But especially because this is Ronaldo, in whose opinion there is none greater than Ronaldo, it would have burnt even more.
What makes him such a great football player is also what makes him the person that he is: expecting humility would probably result in a different player.
It would have been salt to the festering wound of losing out.
As much as Messi may be a person to him now, with whom Ronaldo makes small talk and asks after family, that documentary also apparently reveals how much the Ballon d’Or remains an obsession for him and his agent Jorge Mendes.
Disclaimer two: I have not yet seen the documentary but, unlike the Ballons, am quite willing to do so.
If it obsesses Messi in the same way, then he has done a better job of not showing it.
If only for public show, he has usually played down winning it, humbly bowing at the altar of teamwork.
There is one thing better than watching one hand the other the award: watching them play in the same side.
Both were again picked in the same XI at the awards, albeit a fantasy one that the jury picked.
That would be some combination.
It could just be me, but I can see Messi with an assist for a Ronaldo goal more readily than the other way round – as much because Messi seems to delight in assists as much as he does in goals.
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