When the 2024 Ballon d'Or nominees were revealed in the autumn, Mohamed Salah was the only Liverpool player on the 🤑 list. While Alisson Becker deserved to be included (if not in the Ballon d'Or stakes, certainly in the running for 🤑 the Yashin Trophy) after his individual heroics, it certainly wasn't a surprise to see so little Anfield representation.
After all, Jürgen 🤑 Klopp's side had endured a miserable 2024/23 season, failing to qualify for the Champions League and exiting the competition at 🤑 the round of 16 stage with a heavy 6-2 aggregate defeat to Real Madrid. While these are ostensibly individual awards, 🤑 they are almost always viewed through the prism of collective accomplishment, and so Liverpool's broader failures were costly for some 🤑 of its better players.
On Wednesday, the shortlist was released for another of football's most prestigious prizes — a place in 🤑 the FIFPro World XI — and again only one Liverpool player made the cut. This time, it was Virgil van 🤑 Dijk rather than Salah.
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The first thing to understand here is that, while 🤑 it's ostensibly a calendar year award, the best XI is in practice determined by the last complete season. That's why, 🤑 for instance, Kevin De Bruyne has been nominated, despite hardly kicking a ball since June because of injury.
The second is 🤑 that, unlike other awards, this one is solely in the hands of the players, rather than journalists, pundits or pundits. 🤑 According to FIFPro, nearly 22,000 men's players cast their votes for this year's team.
You can't dispute most of the names 🤑 on the list of attackers. Erling Haaland shattered records in firing Manchester City to the treble, Lionel Messi produced an 🤑 all-time great World Cup campaign to lead Argentina to glory, and Kylian Mbappé combined a spectacular performance in the final 🤑 with 41 goals at club level. Elsewhere, Karim Benzema bagged 31 goals for Real Madrid, Harry Kane got 32 for 🤑 Spurs and Vinícius Jr. mixed 23 goals with 21 assists.
Salah, meanwhile, netted 30 and set up 16 more in all 🤑 competitions, and clearly, based on Kane's involvement after a season in which Spurs finished eighth, collective woes aren't an automatic 🤑 disqualifier. Still, you wouldn't feel too aggrieved if any of the other forwards claimed the last spot alongside surefire inclusions 🤑 Haaland and Messi. The real problem is that Salah wasn't nominated at all.
The one player who doesn't have remotely as 🤑 strong a case is Cristiano Ronaldo, who scored three goals in 16 appearances for Manchester United before having his contract 🤑 terminated when he furiously spoke out against the club. He'd already made his last appearance for the Red Devils when 🤑 he traveled to the World Cup, where he failed to score from open play and lost his place in the 🤑 starting line-up for the knockout stages.
His subsequent return of 14 goals in 19 games for Saudi Pro League side Al-Nassr 🤑 was impressive on paper but, as Twenty First Group analyst Aurel Nazmiu noted at the time, that division sat somewhere 🤑 between League One and League Two in quality. That has not substantially changed since and Ronaldo's inclusion is therefore baffling.
On 🤑 that basis, it's egregious that Ronaldo features on the shortlist, and it's pretty clear that he's only there on the 🤑 basis of his pre-existing global reputation. Some would question how much all of this really matters compared to team success, 🤑 and whether Liverpool supporters should really care. Jürgen Klopp and those that matter, after all, already know exactly what the 🤑 Egyptian offers.
But what this tells us is that, despite establishing himself as one of the greatest players in Premier League 🤑 history and one of the best of the modern era, Salah remains underrated, both by the media and, as it 🤑 turns out, his peers. In the second half of the season, once he returns from AFCON, he can continue to 🤑 show exactly why that is unfair.
