Photo: REUTERS / Benoit Tessier
Real Madrid’s striker Karim Benzema won the biggest individual award in football – the Ballon d’Or, which is awarded to the best football player in the world in the selection of the French magazine France Football.
The brilliant Frenchman led his team to the Champions League and La Liga titles, so he had no real competition this year. As the captain of Los Blancos, he scored 44 goals with 15 assists in 46 games in all competitions, and received the trophy from the hands of the legendary Zinedine Zidane.
“It’s a boy’s dream. I think all footballers have that in their head,” said Karim Benzema, who was joined on stage by his father and mother, and his son Ibrahim.
Unlike previous years, the prestigious trophy this time was awarded based on performance throughout the season, rather than a calendar year as was previously the case. The collective aspect and the trophies won were in the background, in favor of individual performances.
This time there was also a tighter number of voters who would still be made up of journalists, with one voter per nation, but the jury included only 100 men’s Ballon d’Or voters (compared to the previous 170), corresponding to the top 100 placed nations in the FiFA rankings and 50 for the Women’s Ballon d’Or in the same way.
Benzema is a wizard. Only couple of years ago, he was struggling and how he is ballon d’or winner. WOW