Messi named best player of 2010
Lionel Messi won the inaugural men’s 2010 FIFA Ballon d’Or today, given to the best soccer player in 2010. The award was created for 2010 by merging France Football’s Ballon d’Or and the FIFA World Player of the Year award, both of which Messi won last year as well.
FIFA also named the World XI team, the best eleven players in the world by position (kinda like the NFL’s All-Pro team). Amazingly, six of the eleven are from a single team, Spain’s FC Barcelona. (All three of the finalists for the Ballon d’Or were from Barcelona as well.)
I’ve been watching Barcelona this year and I’m not sure professional American sports has seen anything like what this team is1. On paper, they’re the best team on the planet by a wide margin (and that includes the World Cup-winning Spanish team, where several players — but not, notably, Messi — overlap) and in practice they’re almost as good. Many of the players coming off the bench could start on just about any other team in Europe. But they still have to play the games and having six of the best eleven players on the planet doesn’t guarantee wins, especially in a strongly team-oriented sport like soccer. Still lots of fun to watch them play, though.
[1] Maybe the Yankees in the 30s or 40s. Or the Celtics in the 60s. But neither of those teams had the three best players in the world on their rosters. ↩
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