ITT: LEO 'KING' MESSI

nice

that's a full grasp

six hat-tricks so far this year

<3 this photo. Look at VDS's face lolol

http://s3.amazonaws.com/images.nachofoto.com/b-Lionel-Messi-one-of--47c0b850868e.jpeg

he looks so....small

he is

a puny 22 goals in 17 games is pretty shit for someone with six hat-tricks.

year != season

ah right. i don't care enough for my pointless contrarian cynicism to look up the appropriate stat, then. :'(

http://i.imgur.com/jZXJI.jpg

the rumours were that iniesta had this!

Lionel Messi tonight became the inaugural winner of the Fifa Ballon d'Or at an award ceremony in Zurich. The Argentinian forward was selected ahead of his Barcelona team-mates Xavi and Andrés Iniesta, who won the World Cup with Spain last summer.

Messi, 23, scored an astonishing 60 goals for club and country in 2010 and is regarded by many as the most gifted player of his generation.

The Fifa Ballon d'Or was created following the merging of France Football magazine's European Footballer of the Year prize with the FIFA World Player of the Year award. It is awarded based on votes cast by journalists from around the world and coaches and captains of national teams.

Messi was the holder of both titles and so joins the former Brazil strikers Ronaldo and Rivaldo and France legend Zinedine Zidane as a multiple winner of the latter accolade.

Alfredo Di Stefano, Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Kevin Keegan, Michel Platini, Marco van Basten, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Ronaldo are the only other men to win the Ballon d'Or more than once. Messi also became the first player to come first in a World Cup year without having won the tournament for the first time since 1994.

Lionel Messi tonight became the inaugural winner of the Fifa Ballon d'Or at an award ceremony in Zurich.

how can he be the inaugural winner if all those other dudes won it more than once?

the ballon d'or has been combined with the less prestigious fifa world player of the year to create this new award

oh

i'd imagine, then, that if it's a new award, ushering in a new era, that they'd want the first winner to be the player who regardless of how he matched up against iniesta or whoever will v likely be remembered as an icon of his generation

it's not the ballon d'iouf

it's voted on by players and journos afaik....don't think fifa have any say

messi is the correct choice, tho there was an arg for xavi also

full list of votes here: http://bit.ly/hMj0fV
von bommel's an idiot.

things notice on the first page: 1. o vermaelen. 2. lol 'captain of the national team'. quality nominative determinism. 3. 'invalid vote'? did prince glenson vote for another domenican?

He voted for van persie :)

Did the Irish FA refuse to co-operate?

c-ron not voting for messi

Messi also became the first player to come first in a World Cup year without having won the tournament for the first time since 1994.

Was this Baggio?

stoichkov

baggio won it 93

oh ok. <3 stoichkov.

I hope Van Bommel voted for 'Mark Van Bommel' in first and second place.

David Villa did pretty badly in this all things considered.

yeah but lol valencia

Apparently if only the journalists' votes are counted (like how it used to be) Sneijder wins?

Team of the year. No Englishmen, no English-based players. Don't they watch the best league in the world?

GK - Casillas
DEF - Maicon, Lucio, Pique, Puyol
MID - Sneijder, Xavi, Iniesta
ATK - Messi, Villa, Ronaldo

wouldn't fancy that on a wet tuesday night in stoke

puyol at left back would be their downfall

awesome video of messi not going down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sJhh-YcvbU

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9dkmyZMvQ1qzvxm5.gif

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9dkmyZMvQ1qzvxm5.gif

does messi generally eschew diving cuz i) he isn't a choad or ii) he's more dangerous with the ball than from free kicks

lil from column a, lil from column b i'd guess

iii) doesnt really need to. A tackle that knocks him enough off stride to bother is generally a clear foul

staying on your feet has him go past 1 player and thus he's more likely to have less in front of him, meaning more time to pass or shoot or carry on dribbling while the rest have to then change positions to cover the player who failed in taking him down, possibly leaving others free?

true for any player- though the rate of inconvenience in staying upright obv varies on a scale from messi to heskey

ironically you'd think that heskey would be top of that scale and the midget at the bottom tho

not really, centre of gravity and all that.

Mind you, heskey was an ox at leicester, only turned into england's #1 most obvious, shameful and worst diver under houllier at liverpool.

gerard 'foreign' houllier

just how it happened imo, no further connotations to be drawn from it.

Tho he did have a big influence on gerrard, just sayin

idk

just about everyone dives, gerrard is only egregious because he's a hypocrite

doubt houiller is any different to ferguson et al

iirc Barca vs Bayern Champion's League Semi or Quarter Final from a couple of years ago, messi was clearly fouled in the box but instead got booked for diving. Pep so incensed he was sent to the stands. Of course the ref was Howard Webb mind.

Spanish supremo Sid Lowe makes that case that Lionel Messi’s world player of the year award was a slap in the face for Spain’s world cup win. “Only one Spanish player has ever won the award – Luis Suárez in 1960 – and for years the reason was assumed to be that, while Madrid and Barcelona had been among the continent’s very best teams, there was no international success to push Spanish players over the line. Now at last there is. But this time, more than any other time, the World Cup has not been decisive. If it had been, Messi would not have won the award.”

James Lawton also criticises the award to Messi, claiming Andres Iniesta should have scooped the top prize. “Iniesta fought serious injury all the way to South Africa, playing whenever it was humanly possible for Barca, and then had a magnificent World Cup. He was the relentless fixer of crisis and when Spain’s first World Cup triumph was in jeopardy he delivered the coup de grâce to the thuggish Dutchmen. On a cold, dangerous night in Johannesburg he won the prize by the force of his nature as much as his extraordinary talent. His name should have been in Blatter’s pocket and then brought out of that dark place into the light of authentic fame.”

this is bullshit. "sure iniesta may have barely played all season (and villa was spain's best player) but he should have won it over the greatest player in the world and possibly the history of football"

well done for winning the world cup spain, you just don't happen to have the best player in the world != a kick in the teeth.

I think there's some kind of weird convention where in a World Cup year you're meant to give it to a player from the winning country. Cannavaro and all that.

but it's voted on by a huge group of people, it seems weird that people are making it out as a conspiracy against spain.

little guy just scored his second against betis. persistent.