Best FIFA Football Awards: Mohamed Salah Wins Puskas Award On Night Of Glitz, Glamour And Cloying Vapid Pointlessness (Photos)

Chris Wright

25th, September 2018

4 Comments

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Tuesday night saw most of the great and good of the modern footballing sphere descend on London for the 2018 Best FIFA Best Awards of the Year FIFA Best Awards (or something like that).

On a fairly nonsensical night of skewed fan votes and meaningless, faux-prestige popularity contests, the charade was perhaps best demonstrated by Mohamed Salah emerging from the Royal Festival Hall with the 2018 Puskas Award tucked beneath his arm.

Salah landed the award (handed over to him by Noel Gallagher, because of course) for the most beautiful goal of the year with his cut-inside-and-curl effort against Everton last December.

A decent enough goal, but hardly on par with Gareth Bale’s audacious overhead kick in the CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINAL or Cristiano Ronaldo’s similarly acrobatic effort against Juventus or Benjamin Pavard’s delightful fader against Argentina AT THE WORLD CUP or Ricardo Quaresma’s exquisite ‘trivela’ goal against Iran that FIFA subsequently named the goal of the tournament AT THE WORLD CUP.

It was an interactive fan vote, in case you hadn’t already guessed.

Even James Milner couldn’t resist a dig while congratulating his Liverpool teammate…

Well, he’s not wrong.

Elsewhere, Luka Modric beat Ronaldo and Salah into second and third place respectively to win the 2018 Best FIFA Men’s Player of the Year award.

(Interestingly, Harry Kane was selected as the best player in the world by the national team captains of the Bahamas, Chinese Taipei and Vanuatu)

Didier Deschamps was voted Best FIFA Coach of the Year while Marta took the spoils as Best FIFA Women’s Player of the Year.

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Thibaut Courtois was named Goalkeeper of the Year (though he was omitted from the Team of the Year, where David De Gea was selected betwixt the sticks) while Peru were voted Fans of the Year for being thoroughly likeable at the World Cup.

The FIFPro World XI Team of the Year was De Gea, Dani Alves (?), Raphael Varane, Sergio Ramos, Marcelo; Luka Modric, N’Golo Kante, Eden Hazard; Kylian Mbappe, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo.

And that’s that. Hours and hours of banal FIFA spiel condensed into 500 words.

In conclusion: There are far too many football award shows and votes these days.

Posted in FIFA, Liverpool

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4 Comments

  1. Nuno says:

    To be fair, I cannot say there was a clearly better right-back. Maybe Carvajal, but couldn’t have 4 Real Madrid defenders. Maybe Walker or Kimmich, but not by a great margin for me; Pavard was good at WC but almost unknown before.
    Also fun that Salah is 3rd best player in the world but not in that XI (same for Courtois / De Gea). And that best goal is a joke.
    The marvels of fan vote!

  2. jackie wilshere says:

    ha-ha, charade you are

  3. Jules says:

    It’s a complete joke. De Gea was 10 times better than Courtois, Dani Alves had one of his worst seasons ever and how can someone (lots of people) vote for Varane as the best player in the world?

    Also… who likes Noel Gallagher?

  4. Dr.Cajetan Coelho says:

    Congratulations to all the winners.

Leave a Reply to Jules