Zinedine Zidane has voiced his disagreement with a past Ballon d’Or decision, arguing that a certain player was unfairly denied the award in 2010 despite an exceptional year that included winning the World Cup.
In 1998, Zinedine Zidane led France to conquer the World Cup and, consequently, won the Ballon d’Or that year. Subsequently, in 2002 the same thing happened with Ronaldo Nazario and in 2006, with Fabio Cannavaro. However, in 2010 that logic would be broken, when Lionel Messi won the award when Spain was world champion.
And that Spanish National Team had players from Barcelona, but more precisely, it had Andrés Iniesta, hero in the final in South Africa, with his goal in extra time, which gave the World Cup to La Roja. And, according to Zinedine Zidane, El Cerebro was robbed of his Ballon d’Or.
Speaking years later about what happened in 2010, Zidane acknowledged: “I admired his way of playing, and he didn’t win a Ballon d’Or but he deserved it. He deserved to win when he won the World Cup, he had an exceptional year, he won the World Cup and scored the goal in the final. It’s obvious that he deserved it.”
That year, Barcelona was champion of LALIGA, but not of the Champions League. Even so, Lionel Messi was the top scorer in both competitions and ended up keeping the award despite the fact that Argentina was eliminated in the Quarterfinals of the World Cup, at the hands of Germany.
France Football editor apologized to Iniesta
“Forgive us, Andrés,” thus began the editorial of France Football the day Andrés Iniesta announced his retirement from the courts. Pascal Ferre, editor of the newspaper at that time, publicly apologized for the Ballon d’Or that they deprived him of winning in 2010.
“For us he was not only a player, he was the player. His sacrifices for his team ultimately deprived him of having greater individual recognition,” Ferre highlighted in that article. “Of all the absentees on the list of Ballon d’Or winners, his is particularly painful. He is the greatest facilitator of the game in all of history.”
To close, Ferre described Andrés Iniesta’s game on the court in a couple of simple phrases: “While most of his contemporaries are complicated, he has enjoyed soccer for 15 years, making everything simple. Without vanity, he just thinks about giving life to the game.“
Zidane’s comments and the apology from France Football highlight the widespread recognition of Iniesta’s talent and the feeling that he was unfairly denied the Ballon d’Or in 2010.
