Sadio Mane was a great player. The phrasing here is deliberate — a world in which the Senegalese winger, little more than the Robin to Cristiano Ronaldo’s Batman in the Saudi Pro League, makes it to the Ballon d’Or 30-man shortlist… is not a serious world.
Sure, Mane won the Africa Cup of Nations in January of this year. Well, he did, until Senegal’s trophy was seized and re-distributed to Morocco in a court ruling, months after the fact. Regardless, is that enough?
Ballon d’Or, how is Sadio Mane in your 30-player shortlist?!
Sure, Mane won AFCON’s Player of the Tournament — that wasn’t taken from him. Well, he did, with two pea-roller assists in a Round of 16 clash versus Sudan (gifted to him by glorious efforts from Papa Gueye and Ibrahim Mbaye) and one brilliant strike against Egypt in the semi-final.
His claim to making the Ballon d’Or’s 30-man shortlist begins and ends there. The 34-year-old was named Player of the Tournament not because his play was undeniable, but because he is Sadio Mane.
It must be stressed, there are other players present in the Ballon D’or 30-player shortlist whose places are near equally undeserved. For example, Julian Quinones and Dayot Upemecano stand out as two such individuals that should be nowhere near France Football’s award.
But there’s something in Mane’s inclusion that feels particularly egregious: it speaks directly to the nonsensical criteria that is used to determine which players are nominated for, or even win, the award. For starters, what is the Ballon d’Or’s obsession with international trophies?
Why is it that international tournament winners— in this case, Mane with AFCON — are automatically more deserving of a place on the 30-man shortlist, or a higher finish in France Football’s rankings, than players who excelled at club level?
That was made clear in 2018, when Lionel Messi, with 48 goal involvements, and Mohamed Salah, with 60 contributions, finished fifth and sixth in France Football’s list respectively.
That was the year that Luka Modric somehow left with the Ballon d’Or in his clutches… because he’d received the Golden Ball in a World Cup tournament. Oh, and Antoine Griezmann managed to bag third.
‘Trophy logic’ is wildly inconsistent — as some of Messi’s staunchest critics have pointed out, he won the 2019 Ballon d’Or with nothing but a LaLiga title to his name, yet his solitary World Cup trophy, and a Ligue 1 title that PSG nearly always win, was enough to supersede a treble-winning Erling Haaland’s claim in 2023.
The same pattern reared its ugly head when Rodri took home the 2024 award, propelled, very clearly, by Spain’s European Championship victory — denying a treble-winning Vinicius Junior.
A year later? Winning the treble was now enough for PSG’s Ousmane Dembele. He departed with the award, despite Salah and Raphinha clearly having stronger individual seasons, and winning their respective leagues, in tougher conditions.
Salah broke the Premier League record for goal involvements, and won the most-competitive top-flight title in Europe, without a single team-mate of his making France Football’s 30-man shortlist.
Raphinha racked up a staggering 21 Champions League goal contributions in just 14 games, and contributed to three goals versus Inter Milan, while his team shipped seven goals in a 7-6 aggregate defeat.
Elsewhere, Dembele played merely 1,736 Ligue 1 minutes — the equivalent of just 19 games.
For a so-called individual award, it seems that a player’s individual season is actually accounted for last, club-level trophies in second, and international silverware in first. That is farcical.
Mane is the latest beneficiary of such silly criteria. A mediocre club-level season with Al-Nassr, bagging just 10 goals en-route to Saudi Pro League victory, an average World Cup in which Senegal embarrassingly fell to an historic Belgium comeback, all superseded by an AFCON trophy… that was later taken away from him.
And hey, at least he stood on the pitch against Morocco and begged his Senegalese team-mates to return after they stormed off. That gave him ‘fair play’ points, right, France Football?