The 30 contenders for this year’s Ballon d’Or have been released and it looks like the Premier League is becoming the victim of its own success.
Of the 30 nominees, only five are current Premier League players, and even if you count Marc Cucurella and Rodri, who left England this summer, that’s only seven.
Yes, it’s probably fair that Paris Saint-Germain dominate after winning the Champions League, while the likes of Rodri and Ferran Torres will largely be there for their roles in Spain’s World Cup success.
But just three players from Arsenal (Declan Rice, William Saliba, and Gabriel Magalhaes) seems a bit harsh for winning the Premier League and reaching the Champions League final. Under what criteria do Bayern Munich deserve to have more players in there? And what did Kylian Mbappe, Jude Bellingham, or Vinicius Junior win in the last twelve months?
Do Arsenal lack superstars or do the weaker leagues flatter their rivals?
Arsenal fans looking into buying Bayern Munich football tickets for their upcoming Champions League clash will surely have nothing to fear. After all, they comfortably outplayed them in a 3-1 win in last season’s league phase, with their defence suffocating Harry Kane so much that he had to drop into midfield and didn’t register a shot on target in the entire game.
And yet, many neutrals would probably agree that Arsenal lack that ‘superstar’ in their team, especially in attack, with the north London giants trying, but ultimately failing, to address that this summer as they targeted the likes of Morgan Rogers and Julian Alvarez.
Still, one might also reasonably argue that it’s become almost impossible to register the kinds of crazy numbers that Bayern’s front three have been producing in the Bundesliga in a competition as evenly matched as the Premier League.
Put Bukayo Saka in this Bayern team and he might well hit 50 goal contributions a season. Bring Kane back to a Premier League club and he’d likely go back to being a 25-goal-a-season striker like he was in his Tottenham days, as opposed to the record highs he’s hit since moving to Germany.
The strange result of playing in a harder league is that you can’t stat-pad your way to a Ballon d’Or nomination. How long until the game’s biggest individual award moves with the times and recognises that it has ceased to be a real meritocracy as it struggles in navigating the rather more complicated post-Messi-and-Ronaldo world?