It has been a rollercoaster year but there are some things that remain constant like Lionel Messi being the world’s greatest footballer … hold on a minute, what do you mean he isn’t?
That’s right, having taken top spot last year Messi has fallen to second place in the Guardian’s annual ranking, as Cristiano Ronaldo regained the top slot he last enjoyed in 2014.
It wasn’t a particularly tight contest either: Messi secured 24% of the judges’ first preference votes while Ronaldo’s tally was more than twice that. It is a reversal in fortunes from the 2015 vote when Messi secured 74% of the judges’ first preference votes compared to Ronaldo’s 6%.
Having claimed the Henri Delaunay Trophy as part of Portugal’s win at Euro 2016, helped Real Madrid to both the Uefa Champions League and the Club World Cup and received the Ballon d’Or award (again) it is little wonder that Ronaldo has described this as his “perfect year”.
Other than Ronaldo and Messi, just four other players shared the first preference tallies of the 124 judges from 45 nations. Uruguay’s Luis Suárez and France’s Antoine Griezmann both received 10% of the vote while Gareth Bale (3%), Neymar and Riyad Mahrez (1% each) secured the remaining ballots.
Three in 10 of the players on this year’s list were newcomers, the highest-ranked being the French midfielder N’Golo Kanté whose Leicester City, Chelsea and France performances helped put him firmly in the judges’ sights over the course of the year.
The player who saw the biggest improvement on his ranking in last year’s top 100 was Leicester’s Riyad Mahrez, who jumped 87 places in a year. His team-mate and England’s top-ranked player, Jamie Vardy, jumped 49 places in the same period to 19th.
The biggest fallers included Real Madrid’s James Rodríguez, Arjen Robben of Bayern Munich and Thibaut Courtois of Chelsea, who all dropped by 56 or more places in the course of the past year. Wayne Rooney dropped out of the list entirely, securing votes from just two judges.
Nationalities
Spain has the highest number of footballers in the top 100 list for the fifth year running. However, its tally of 12 players was well below last year’s 16.
Brazil and France both had 11 player in the ranking this year (up from 10 last year) meaning each country could technically field a football team drawn just from players on the list (although, admittedly, this would mean Brazil wouldn’t have a goalkeeper).
On the back of their 2016 Euro win, Portugal saw its player tally improve dramatically: Ronaldo now has the the company of six other countrymen - Pepe, Renato Sanches, Raphaël Guerreiro, Rui Patrício, Nani and Adrien Silva.
Leagues
If a league is measured by the number of players in the top 100 list then, according to the Guardian’s panel of experts, the English Premier League was a cut above the rest this year with 32 players, having tied with La Liga in 2015 with 28.
But if you’re a fan of the Spanish league or simply someone who likes antagonising Premier League diehards then it may interest you to know that all top-six footballers play in Spain and that the players seventh and eighth – Robert Lewandowski and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang – are from the Bundesliga. Only then do those from the Premier League come into play.
Italy’s Serie A and France’s Ligue 1 round off the top-five leagues represented. Just four other leagues had players on this year’s list (down from eight last year).
Portugal’s Primeira Liga has two players on the list (Patrício in 75th position and Silva at 91) while the domestic leagues of Brazil (Gabriel Jesus at No64) and Colombia (Miguel Borja at No83) also feature.
Ages
Feel like football players are forever getting younger? Well try telling that to Francesco Totti, who made the top 100 list this year at the age of 40. In all there were 32 players aged 30 or older on this year’s list compared to 24 last year. The youngest player on the list is 17-year-old Italian Gianluigi Donnarumma, a newcomer at No80 and one of four teenagers to make it into this year’s ranking.
However, the average age of footballers on the list fell slightly in the past year, bucking the trend which had seen the average age of players rise gradually from 26 in 2012 to 28 in 2015.
To be precise, the average football player on the Guardian’s top 100 list was the age of 27 years, four months, two weeks in 2016. A year ago he was exactly 28-years-old.
