I find it comical how every time Messi and Haaland are mentioned in a sentence, all the Messi fans (the toxic ones) go and discredit Haalands phenomenal season and talk about how he’s just a striker so his goals are just normal. I genuinely don’t know what a player has to do in order to beat Messi because he could do the bare minimum and win it. Haaland did everything this year. He won everything there is to win and contributed to every game he played yet people still want to crown Messi as the 2023 PotY which I think is delusional. Messi is the greatest, but this was not his YEAR. One good month in a year with 11 other bad ones does not equal 12 months of solid high performance and consistency from Haaland. He has done everything he possibly could to win it, meanwhile Messi had one piece of the puzzle. It’s utterly unfair that haaland cannot compete on an international level with Norway and therefore cannot ever be considered the greatest player of the year. People are pretending like Messi did something insane this year, he didn’t. He had a good month. If this was any other player you lot would be fuming.
Anyways that’s my opinion, in the end it’s not like either of them loses sleep over it.
I’m not expecting serious discussions. I’ll probably be called a fanboy or get told to cope a few times but that’s what you get in this community. This is just from a casual fan perspective so if I’m wrong, let me know politely without insults thanks.
Journalists just like to give him ballon d’or, even though 5 of his weren’t deserved (Xavi, Neymar/Ronaldo, VVD, Lewandowski, Haaland), for the sake of enhancing the lens of “good old time” football.
This fascination of “talented” players and “fancy” narratives really ruined football. For example, take a look on how many people will take Neymar over De Bruyne, or Ronaldinho over Lewandowski at all time rankings.
Pure delusion, i know. Now because no one is the face of the “talented” players or “fancy” narratives, they have to make some fugazy case for Messi to win it, and also to smear Ronaldo’s face in football history, because you know, the history of football in the early 21st century is basically Ronaldo vs Messi, right?
Believe me, if Ronaldo had stopped being world’s top 10 player in terms of quality every year post-Madrid, they’d stop giving messi the ballon d’or.
Never heard such tripe in my life. I get that you’re one of those guys that gets all soppy about a player having the best season of their career and upset at the thought of them missing out on a balon d’or to the actual best player in the world just because they’ve already won it a bunch of times, but wake up and see some sense.
Messi realistically should already have 10+ and none of the players you mentioned realistically deserved one over him. Get a grip.