Lionel Messi (Argentina), who led Argentina to victory at the 2022 Qatar World Cup and received the Golden Ball, the best player award, challenges the International Football Federation (FIFA) Player of the Year award.
On the 12th, FIFA confirmed and announced the award candidates for the 2022 The Best FIFA Football Awards by category.
FIFA established the 1991 Player of the Year award. Since 2010, it has been awarded under the name of ‘FIFA Ballon d’Or’ by integrating it with Ballon d’Or selected by French football magazine France Football, and since 2016 it has been separated from Ballon d’Or and awarded separately.
Messi, who has won the Golden Ball by giving Argentina its first championship in 36 years, challenges to win the FIFA World Player of the Year award for the first time in three years since 2019. Considering his performance in the World Cup and his team, winning the award is very likely. Messi, who was born in 1987 and turns 35 this summer and will turn 36 this summer, still reigns as the best player in the world.
France’s Kylian Mbappe (Paris Saint-Germain) is also one of the candidates. In addition, Karim Benzema, Vinicius Junior, Luka Modric (both Real Madrid), Robert Lewandowski (Barcelona), Julian Alvarez, Kevin Debrawiner, Elling Hollan (both Manchester City), Ashraf Hakimi and Neymar (both Paris Saint-Germain) ), Jude Bellingham 바카라사이트, Sadio Mane (Bayern Munich) and Mohamed Salah (Liverpool).
On the other hand, Cristiano Ronaldo, who had a rival relationship with Messi, was not even nominated. This is the first time that Ronaldo has not been included in the shortlist for the panel of experts. In effect, it marks the end of the Ronaldo era.
The nominees for this year’s male coach include Lionel Scaloni, the Argentine national team coach who led the Qatar World Cup victory, Morocco coach Walid Lacraki, who made a sensation at the World Cup, France coach Didier Deschamps, Pep Guardiola (Spain) Manchester City coach, and Carlo Ahn. Celotti (Italy) and Real Madrid coach were selected.
The five nominees for Male Goalkeeper of the Year include Qatar World Cup best goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez (Aston Villa) of Argentina, Alisson Becker (Liverpool) and Ederson (Manchester City) of Brazil, Yassin Bunu (Sevilla) of Morocco, Belgium’s Thibaut Courtois (Real Madrid) competes.
The award winner will be determined by integrating the results of the head coach, captain, media, and fan vote of each FIFA member country. Voting will be held until the 3rd of next month on FIFA’s content platform, FIFA+. Based on this, FIFA plans to announce the three finalists for each of the following categories.
The awards ceremony will be held in Paris on the 27th of next month.