F
Flavia
Guest
It is not an award for the best player in the world, it is an award for the best individual performance. There is a distinction between the two. If it were the latter, then as long as Messi still plays (or until he drastically declines), the award would have to go to him every year. The best player of the world overall might not necessarily have the best, most stellar performance every year.
And this is coming from a huge Messi fan.
That's all semantics to me. Best player on a year, and best individual performance in a year is the same thing. The ballon d'or is not for the player whose team won the most titles, it's for the player who performed the best overall on that year. Usually it coincides, but sometimes it doesn't.