How do you measure greatness? Sport offers countless accolades, trophies and medals to reward fine achievements – but does that accurately gauge talent, hard work and significance?
Unless Igors Stepanovs is willing to hand back all his Arsenal medals, I’m going out on a limb and saying no.
Nevertheless, football seems relentlessly entranced by the undeniable talents of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi year on year, as they bid to be crowned as the world’s ‘best’ player. There is nothing in the rulebook to suggest that other players – God forbid – could be in the reckoning while these players are still active. And yet, despite their obvious uncanny knack for producing obscene amounts of goals every season, people wouldn’t dare to mention others under the same breath.
Except this isn’t a Best Goalscorer award. Messi and Ronaldo may well be two of the greatest goalscorers of all time. But that is not to devalue the exploits of other players who, in terms of trophies and personal honours may even out-perform these giants of the modern game.
And so, even if we are to continue this trend whereby we reward supreme excellence in goalscoring – as opposed to individual performance – by bestowing the highest-possible personal accolade in the Ballon d’Or upon them, why shouldn’t Mohamed Salah not just be considered, but be the front-runner for the award?
Mark my words, if Messi has an under-par World Cup and Argentina still manage to win every knockout game on penalties, he will win the Ballon d’Or. That is almost a given.
It’s almost been decided that the destination of this year’s award will be determined by the fortunes of Portugal and Argentina at this World Cup. Because to say that Mohamed Salah is a hypothetical Ballon d’Or winner is to say that he is better than Ronaldo and Messi.
Overall, you’d have a hard time successfully arguing that that is the case. But looking at this season, Salah is at least on a par with those two. And the tragedy is that he may well have a good World Cup with Egypt, but of course, a successful World Cup for Egypt is likely to be a disastrous one for Argentina or Portugal (or England).
This has been a problem for years. The Ballon d’Or award has suffered a severe identity crisis, not least because of its brief merging and confusion with FIFA's World Player of the Year award, as we are living in a unique era where two players - who would otherwise stand alone as the most gifted player on the planet - are playing simultaneously.
As a result, what the award was perhaps meant to signify has come to mean something else as we look to separate these two players with some sort of certitude - as if we have to universally agree that one is better than the other.
But the fact is, once Ronaldo and Messi have hung up their boots, it will matter little how many Ballon d’Ors each have won. We will just appreciate them for their individual brilliance. The debate will not be settled by trophies or by how one is better because they’re less arrogant or something inane like that. It will rage on.
Personally, I can’t believe there’s always a debate about Pele and Maradona when one of them is a proven cheat and drug abuser. That’s football for you, I guess.
Mohamed Salah’s prominence has come at a cruel time in that it is a World Cup year, and before the duopoly of Messi and Ronaldo, the World Cup had often dictated the whereabouts of yearly honours.
The most recent non-CR7/Leo winner in a World Cup year was Fabio Cannavaro, who had captained Italy to glory in 2006. Brazilian Ronaldo capped a marvellous World Cup with a Ballon d’Or in ’02, while Zinedine Zidane won in 1998 when France triumphed on home soil. Barcelona’s Hristo Stoichkov scooped the prize in 1994 on the back of a superb World Cup for Bulgaria, taking the Golden Boot when they finished fourth, and Lothar Matthaus won the award following the Germans’ victorious Italia ’90 campaign.
Ordinarily, Manuel Neuer would have been a shoo-in for the 2014 award with four trophies for Bayern Munich that season before winning the World Cup, but that’s a testament to the power of the grip that these two have on the game nowadays - and those who vote continue to display their narrow-mindedness, much to football purists’ disappointment.
So if history is to repeat its former self, it’s fair to say Salah has his work cut out – especially as he looks set to miss the opening game. But in an ideal world, one would like to think that this summer’s tournament could be deemed largely irrelevant.
No-one has scored as many as Salah has in a 38-game Premier League season. Not even Ronaldo himself, who scored 31 in an arguably more impressive Manchester United side that went on to win the Champions League – with a fair bit of luck – in the year he secured his first personal crown.
Since Ronaldo’s move to Spain, he and Messi have continuously scored north of 30 each season in a mildly competitive league, although they do each have their fair share of European honours.
To be clear, this isn’t a “they can’t do it on a wet Tuesday night in Stoke” argument (by the way, Salah can even do it on a cold Wednesday night – without gloves), Salah has nevertheless bettered every man that has tried before him, and has rewritten the history books in the way that Messi and Ronaldo do on a consistent basis.
Why should we have to wait for him to become consistent before we take him seriously? This season is finished, and the stats won’t change. Mohamed Salah has done exactly what we would have expected of Ronaldo and Messi in the same situation. If Salah was playing for Real Madrid or Barcelona, he’d have the trophies to show for it too – and then there’d be no argument.
Give the man what he deserves and hold him in the highest regard, and then hope the footballers, managers and journalists do likewise.
Then again, he’s not even the best Mohamed in the Egypt team…
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