Why not? Based on individual stats, he is ahead of Messi.
Implying that Messi won the last four because he had
better stats than Ronaldo? As Flavia said, this year, he failed to impress in every aspect except goalscoring. And that's nothing new at all. People knew he can score loads of goals in the last years too, which didn't help him at all. The voters aren't obsessively counting every goal to evaluate whom they vote for, that's why there's no need to go on about this each time Ronaldo scores. He always has.
And by the way, in the last 3 years, Mesut Özil has created more chances and given more assists than any other player in Europe, including Messi, Ronaldo, Ribery, Xavi, etc. Does that mean he'd deserve an award too? Stats don't matter at all. No need to get obsessive over them.
Ribery is going to deservedly win it
Go to the FIFA website and look at the PDF containing last year's votes. Search the document for "Lionel Messi" - now tell me if you honestly think Ribery could match that number? Pay special attention to voters from outside of Europe.
If a player's main advantage is winning titles and given the amount of votes Messi and CR get simply because of their status as the best two players in the world, that player would need to be clearly above everyone else from his club to collect enough votes to compete with those two. In Ribery's case this is simply not the case - the Bayern competition on this shortlist is much too high for him to get 20-30% of the votes. It's similar to expecting 2010 Xavi to beat Messi when Iniesta is nominated too. Bayern can't even campaign for him as much as they did until now, because they wouldn't dare to promote him while also 3 of their home-grown German players are among the nominees.
Having said that, Lahm and Schweinsteiger have equally good chances as Ribery, given that they are considered to currently be the world's best on their respective position, which is not the case for Ribery. (No one really argues that Ribery > CR).
