If Lionel Messi wasn’t Lionel Messi, he would have won the Ballon D’Or
45 goals and 23 assists in 50 matches. Lifting the La Liga trophy for the ninth time since making his debut in 2004 and for the fourth time in five years, winning the Spanish Cup for the fifth time in seven years and yet another Spanish Super Cup.
Those incredible statistics would, if they were racked up by anyone other than Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, have you as an absolute shoo-in for the runaway winner of the Ballon D’Or — the award given to the best player in the world in a calendar year, voted for by football journalists.
This year’s Ballon D’Or was awarded to Luka Modric, the Croatian midfielder who guided his country to the World Cup Final and won the Champions League with his club Real Madrid. Of course, these are both great achievements, but do they really justify Modric being honoured as the greatest player in the world this year?
Messi’s magic remains strong
Every time I watch Messi he carries his team to new levels — even alongside the world-class players he’s been surrounded by throughout his career at Barcelona. He is the only player in the world that wins games at such a high standard by himself on a regular basis, except perhaps for Ronaldo. But it seems that we’ve become so accustomed to how good he is that we now simply take it for granted.
Just last week, I watched Messi put Barcelona into the lead in a Champions League match against PSV Eindhoven. He picked the ball up on the edge of the box, played a one-two with a teammate to beat five men, and nonchalantly smashed the ball into the net from a seemingly impossible position. I guarantee that Messi is the only footballer on the planet who can score that goal. And Luka Modric certainly could not.
Granted, Modric is a completely different player to Messi, but he’s not even on the same playing field as the magical Argentinean.
For club and country, Messi has racked up 632 goals in 780 matches for club and country since 2004. For Barcelona alone, he’s scored 567 goals in 645 matches in that time period.
But if we look at his stats from 2007, where his magic first hit magical levels, he’s got 617 goals and 254 assists in 719 games for club and country, and a ridiculous 554 goals and 217 assists in 603 games for Barcelona.
Break that down per season and it’s a seasonal average of 46 goals and 18 assists in 50 games at club level — which makes this season pretty much bang on par. The stats are only skewed upwards by his frankly sub-human effort of 79 goals and 21 assists in 60 club appearances back in 2012 — when he racked up 91 goals in 69 appearances for club and country.
The only player on a similar level to Messi is the also incredible Cristiano Ronaldo, who managed to rack up 45 goals and 12 assists in 47 matches in 2018, and came second in the Ballon D’Or. Compare that to Antoine Griezmann (35 goals in 64 matches) and Kylian Mbappe (28 goals in 49 appearances, in a lower standard league), who finished above Messi in the Ballon D’Or but won the World Cup with France, and Mohamed Salah (31 goals in 45 matches), who finished just below him, and they’re not really close.
Modric, for what it’s worth, has only scored 3 goals in 54 appearances in 2018. He’s also yet to score a single goal in 24 appearances this season and is at the heart of a Real Madrid side that’s having a rank average opening to this campaign. But, he did play pretty well against England in the second half of the World Cup Semi-Final.
If any other player racked up 45 goals and 23 assists in a calendar year and his name wasn’t Messi or Ronaldo, is there any debate over whether they’d be the automatic choice for Ballon D’Or winner? We need to stop assessing Messi’s ongoing brilliance based on the ridiculous levels he’s performed at in the past and judge him against the normal level of footballers he’s currently up against.
