Ballon d’Or 2023: Forget Lionel Messi – here’s an alternative men’s winner

Monday night sees football’s glitterati descend on Paris for the Ballon d’Or Awards, judging the sport’s best performers from the 2022-23 season.

But, in the men’s category at least, the result is already a foregone conclusion.

Lionel Messi is widely assumed to have a record eighth Ballon d’Or in the bag, having inspired Argentina to a first World Cup final win since 1986 at his fifth attempt and at the age of 35 – a triumph that represented the crowning glory of his remarkable career.

Few would dispute he deserves it, but if an alternative selection had to be made, who could it be?

GO DEEPER

The Ballon d'Or explained: How to win it, who votes and the Messi, Ronaldo rivalry

France Football asks its voters to consider three things when deciding which player they think is the best in the world: individual performance; team performance and honours (club and international); and ‘class and fair play’.

We’ll start with individual performance, and sometimes you don’t need to overcomplicate things: Erling Haaland made 53 appearances for Manchester City last season and scored 52 goals in all competitions. That, as any maths whizz you know will tell you, is very nearly a goal in every single game. Which is a lot.

He was top scorer in the 2022-23 Premier League with 36, the highest-ever individual tally in a single season in that competition, which made runner-up Harry Kane’s 30 for Tottenham Hotspur look positively ordinary. He was also top scorer in the Champions League with 12 in 11 games. Overall in the Champions League, since making his debut in 2019, he has 37 goals in 33 games.

Team performance? Well, City won the treble (Premier League, FA Cup, Champions League), so we can probably box that one off pretty quickly. International team performance has not been quite so hot, with Norway not making it to the World Cup and their qualification hopes for next summer’s European Championship looking shaky, but that’s not really his fault: he did score four goals in four games for his country last season.

And finally ‘class and fair play’. A more difficult one to judge, but he’s never been sent off in his seven-year senior career and, while this might not be directly related to fair play, that clip where he did an impression of John Stones’ Yorkshire accent was dripping with class.

Nick Miller

Don’t take it from me, listen to his Inter Milan head coach Simone Inzaghi. “He’s worthy of the Ballon d’Or.”

Lautaro Martinez has scored 32 times for Inter this calendar year. His goals in the second legs of Champions League quarter-finals and semi-finals helped Inter reach the final in Istanbul and while they did come up short against Manchester City that night, simply getting there was an achievement: it was their first Champions League final since 2010.

Martinez has been superb for club and country (Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images)

In fact, producing on the biggest occasions became something of a speciality for Martinez. He was on the scoresheet in last season’s Coppa Italia final and Supercoppa for Inter, too, and played a key role in Argentina lifting the World Cup.

Most people remember him for losing his place during that tournament to Julian Alvarez. But without his clutch penalty in the quarter-final shootout against the Netherlands, a crazy game eclipsed only by the craziness of the final, Argentina don’t have the trophy today.

James Horncastle

“I think playing at PSG doesn’t help a lot,” Kylian Mbappe said in an interview with L’Equipe and France Football in July.

Every year the France striker seems to leave for Real Madrid but, for now at least, he remains tethered to a Paris Saint-Germain project that, for all the millions invested, still seems a long way from taking the final step at European level by making them Champions League winners.

The same protagonist said months before that he “fulfilled all the requirements” to compete for the Ballon d’Or with Messi or Haaland, and based on his 2022-23 output, he has a point.

He helped PSG retain the French title, was Ligue 1’s top scorer with 29, broke the record for goals by a Frenchman for club and country in one season (54, surpassing Just Fontaine’s haul from 1957-58) and scored a hat-trick in one of the greatest World Cup finals ever to secure the tournament Golden Boot (with eight goals).

The latter would make him a standout candidate if Messi had not gone one step further, or if his club (also including Messi) had gone further than the last 16 of the Champions League but, at 24 years old, his time will surely come.

Laia Cervello Herrero

Mbappe had a magnificent 2022-23 season (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

Lionel Messi. I get it. The World Cup with Argentina. Then the MLS-Liga MX Leagues Cup with Inter Miami. One goal and two assists in the MLS regular season. Huge, historic.

But is the 36-year-old the world’s best player right now, or is he rather the world’s best walking footballer, strolling around pitches from Doha to Dallas, waiting to come alive long enough to add another couple of YouTube highlights to the library?

Come on. Be honest here. To put it differently, if Messi was available for a reasonable combination of fee and wages tomorrow, which top European clubs would really vie for his services? I can’t think of many.

Jude Bellingham, on the other hand? Nobody would get more offers on an open market. Not even Haaland. The 20-year-old — yes, he’s still only 20 — has smashed all expectations in his first three months at Real Madrid, playing with a swagger and natural authority that befit world football’s heaviest shirt.

But it’s not just the goals in Spain, even though he has scored a ridiculous number of them already.

Bellingham has also become England’s best player this year, had a much better second half of 2022-23 at Borussia Dortmund than Messi did with Paris Saint-Germain (eight goals in Ligue 1! Ooh la la!) and so very nearly led them to their first German championship in 11 years. Is it a coincidence they slipped up against Mainz on the final day of the season when he was out with an injury? Probably not.

My point is, Bellingham is by far the most exciting player to watch at the moment, an all-action freak of a man who doesn’t stop doing thrilling things for the entire 90 minutes, every goddamn game! And that’s what it’s all about.

Raphael Honigstein

The one player Manchester City – the best club team in the world in 2022-23 – can’t do without is not Erling Haaland. It says everything that Rodri played more minutes (a remarkable 4,476) than any other City player in their treble-winning season.

Perhaps just as telling is the fact City lost all three matches when Rodri was suspended earlier this season. They don’t just look different without him; they play differently.

The best player in his position in the world – that’s City manager Pep Guardiola’s view – is absolutely central to their dominance at home and in Europe. Exceptional at receiving under pressure, Rodri makes them tick. Out of possession, his positioning and physicality are keys to City recovering the ball so quickly.

He contributes at the attacking end, too – four goals and seven assists last season, including the winner in the Champions League final. Rodri was named player of the match that night, despite playing “s***” – his words, not mine – and UEFA’s Champions League player of the season too.

Rodri’s goal won the Champions League for City (Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images)

Little more than a week later, Spain won the Nations League final, beating Croatia on penalties, and Rodri was named the player of the four-team finals.

Who says defensive midfielders don’t get all the glory?

Stuart James

(Top photos: Getty Images)