Sport

Dembele’s win shows that Ballon d’Or voting has returned to its roots

In recent years, the Ballon d’Or has become a symbol of football’s increasingly individualistic culture. The criteria for winning it changed without anyone saying so. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have done so much for football, but their generation-defining fight to be the best has perhaps had an adverse effect on the way success is measured, particularly in the realm of this award. Ousmane Dembele’s success on Monday evening was something of a much-needed throwback.

Over the last 20 years, only seven other players have won the Ballon d’Or, and nobody else did for 10 years between 2008 and 2018. It is undeniable that the pair of them were the best players on the planet during that time, but the spirit of the award was bent to effectively become a yardstick to measure which of the pair were better. Before the Messi-Ronaldo axis, no player had won the Ballon d’Or more than three times; Messi has seven to his name and Ronaldo has five. Although both are still playing, it feels unlikely that they will add to their respective totals playing in the United States and Saudi Arabia respectively.

The award never used to simply be reserved for the players everyone recognised as the best on the planet; form and impact were taken into consideration much more. Trophies were important – Zinedine Zidane won it in 1998 after World Cup glory with France, just as Ronaldo did four years later after scoring eight goals in Brazil’s fifth triumph – but because Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi were so well matched, the metric to separate them became so clinical.

Effectively, at their peak, if either won the Champions League for Real Madrid or Barcelona, they would win the Ballon d’Or. Whether another player played a crucial role in winning a major trophy – such as Xavi helping Spain win the 2010 World Cup – it didn’t matter. Messi still won it that year.

In 2003, Pavel Nedved won it while at Juventus after helping them win Serie A, and a Champions League final loss to AC Milan didn’t stop him. A year later, Milan striker Andriy Shevchenko won it after winning the league but again failing to add anything in Europe. It almost felt like different award before and after Messi and Ronaldo established themselves. Perhaps the merger with the FIFA World Player of the Year award between 2010 and 2015, having previously and subsequently been voted for by journalists in association with France Football magazine, contributed to this, but more likely it was a direct reaction to the most unique football rivalry ever seen.

As Messi and Ronaldo have faded from view at elite level, the Ballon d’Or has reasserted its more democratic criteria, even though they have never been stated publicly and officially. Impact and success are again taken fully into account, and it feels like anybody who deserves it is in with a shot. While it may be easy to believe Dembele won it this year because of Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League success, the fact did is still impressive.

Since Messi and Ronaldo changed the face of football, everybody has been looking for the next big rivalry, as if it can be replicated, and a player’s virality has become seen as important. Many thought Lamine Yamal would win it; football’s next superstar, expected to be a dominant force for Barcelona for the next decade and more, has captured the imagination in a way Dembele never has. In fact, Dembele has developed into PSG’s leading light as he’s got older, becoming their talisman as he has grown, for a team which specifically wanted to distance itself from glitz and glamour having built teams full of it and failed in years gone by. Dembele was the right winner because he became the face of a team more focussed on substance than style; like Nedved and Shevchenko before, and Rodri, the brains behind Spain’s European Championships triumph, last year. What must Xavi think?

Yamal will win it soon enough, and deservedly so. Ronaldo and Messi are arguably the two greatest players ever, to witness them battle for more than 10 years was a privilege. But they had indirect consequences, and the watching world used their rivalry, and the Ballon d’Or, as a way to further tribalism. Although they deserved it most years, if they didn’t, it made no difference. Dembele winning shows the award has found its soul again.