Ballon d’Or 2023: Why Lionel Messi vs Erling Haaland Battle Could Be the Most Controversial Race

• The 2023 Ballon d’Or winner will be announced in under a week
• The ceremony will take place at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, France
• Lionel Messi and Erling Haaland are believed to be the frontrunners for the award

The 2023 Ballon d’Or gala ceremony is just around the corner. In less than a week, the French Magazine will announce the players they think were the best over the 2022/2023 season.

The award is always a testament that a player was a class above the rest of his peers. It is an award that gives prominence to individual brilliance and how one helped inspire his or her team to collective success.

Or at least that’s the set criteria on paper. In the past, the award has been shrouded in controversy, with fans arguing endlessly on why a certain player was chosen over the other.

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The 2023 script will be no different. In fact, Sports Brief predicts that the meltdown will be worse despite the name of the supposed winner having already leaked.

Here’s why: assuming Lionel Messi and Erling Haaland will finish in the top two places, a case can be made for each of them to be the winner. It is not like last year when Karim Benzema was the overwhelming favourite.

Let’s break down the pertinent issues the voting panel must consider.

1. World Cup or the treble?

Of course, the World Cup is the biggest trophy a player can lay his hands on. Messi has been chasing it his whole career and was fifth time lucky in Qatar.

However, precedence shows that the World Cup winner isn’t always necessarily the Ballon d’Or winner. As ESPN reports, only three of the last six Ballon d’Or winners following a World Cup year won the title.

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For instance, Messi himself did not win the 2010 World Cup (eliminated in the quarter-finals) but won the Ballon d’Or that year. In fact, the best player at the South Africa edition, Diego Forlan, was a distant fifth. The second-best player, a finalist with the Netherlands, Wesley Sneijder, was fourth.

This analogy is a little bit skewed, considering that the winners had better seasons with their clubs than national teams. Which begs the question, can Haaland’s treble outweigh Messi’s World Cup?

2. Haaland’s no-show in big games

Now that we have established that Haaland might have a point to argue over the World Cup question, let’s come down to the aforementioned term – individual brilliance.

A star player often makes his name in the big games or in dire situations where your team desperately needs you.

The Norwegian might have scored 52 goals and broken a couple of records along the way, but he was a passenger in the big games. He failed to register a goal involvement after the Champions League quarters and in the FA Cup final.

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In contrast, Messi was the X-factor in Argentina’s World Cup triumph. After their defeat to Saudi Arabia on match day one and with the entire weight of a nation on his shoulders, he dragged the team past Mexico and Poland before starring in the entire knockout round.

3. Messi’s ‘poor’ club form

No one is taking Haaland’s 52 goals away from him, but what did Messi do? While the Manchester City star bagged 36 goals in the Premier League, Messi got 16 – and this tally was bettered by nine other players in Ligue 1.

The Argentine was also helpless as PSG were knocked out of the Champions League by Bayern Munich. The only trophies he won were the Ligue 1 and French Cup.

If the World Cup was not in the picture, the Champions League winner is always given preference - a trophy Haaland won despite the misgivings we’ve elucidated in the point above.

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So, in essence, the panel will be battling to answer the question of why the best player of the last 15 years, who completed a fairytale run by winning the only trophy missing from his cabinet, shouldn’t be declared the winner.

But on the other hand, how do you deny someone who has averaged a goal every game the entire season and won the treble in his maiden season in England, the Ballon d’Or?

See? Looming controversy. On October 30, we get the answer.