To find an English footballer in the 23-man shortlist for Fifa’s Ballon d’Or with bookies you needed to scroll down to the 100-1 shots. On the eve of publication, Cristiano Ronaldo was generally 5-1 on, while his old Manchester United mucker, Wayne Rooney, was out with the washing.
English football goes to ground when this list appears. Sticks its fingers in its ears and hibernates. The Premier League is hardly popping corks either. Last season, you had to roll down to Robin van Persie to find a player who draws his wages in England. And Van Persie polled 1.79 per cent of the votes in the great Ronaldo-Lionel Messi duopoly.
At the Zurich Kongresshaus where the game’s icons arrive in presidential convoys, Gareth Bale was the only British player to make the top 10. His vote was 1.32 per cent. After his Champions League final exploits we can expect a stronger showing from the heir to Ryan Giggs. But Roy Hodgson’s England haven't made any inroads.
Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling are potential future mid-market movers. Ahead of them, though, Ronaldo (28 per cent of the vote in 2013) and Messi (25 per cent) will not be fighting off rising stars from England. Neymar (Brazil), James Rodriguez (Colombia) and Eden Hazard (Belgium) will nibble away at the La Liga double act of Messi and Ronaldo. Yet only the giddiest Wembley regular would expect to see a run anytime soon from the core of Hodgson’s New England.
This year's list contains five Premier League players - but none is British. Paul Pogba, who left Manchester United for Juventus, joins the party.
Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Ross Barkley and Jack Wilshere stand behind the weltmeisters of Germany. Manuel Neuer - the world’s best goalkeeper – Toni Kroos, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Thomas Muller and the wonderful Philipp Lahm would rightly object if their achievement in becoming the first European nation to win a World Cup in the Americas were to be downgraded in favour of Premier League hype.
Equally resistant to English hoopla would be Arjen Robben and Zlatan Ibrahimovic – the next two players in the poll after Ronaldo and Messi. Not to mention Andres Iniesta.
A strong personal feeling is that after four successive Messi wins (2009-2012) Ronaldo is now out on his own, for his goals, power, authority and consistency. The bookmakers agree. Messi meanwhile is plugging his Barcelona team-mate, Neymar, as the next limo off the rank.
"He's going to get it, through his qualities, the way he is, I've no doubt that he can at some time win it," Messi says. "He has great potential, he's a player who has a lot of qualities and he can go as far as he wants. I'm lucky enough to rub shoulders with terrific players on the pitch and he's among them."
Perhaps the best way to illustrate English football’s power deficit is to compare last season’s Fifa FIFPro World XI and the PFA Premier League team of the year.
The World XI was: Manuel Neuer, Dani Alves, Thiago Silva, Sergio Ramos, Philipp Lahm, Franck Ribery, Xavi Hernandez, Andres Iniesta, Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Cristiano Ronaldo.
The PFA side: Petr Cech (Chelsea), Seamus Coleman (Everton), Vincent Kompany (Manchester City), Gary Cahill (Chelsea), Luke Shaw (Southampton), Eden Hazard (Chelsea), Yaya Toure (Manchester City), Steven Gerrard (Liverpool), Adam Lallana (Southampton), Luis Suarez (Liverpool), Daniel Sturridge (Liverpool).
Though we hide from the shortlist we can never entirely disengage. The first Ballon d’Or winner, in 1956, was Stanley Matthews, who beat Alfredo Di Stefano and Raymond Kopa. The yearning is still there. Now, though, English football is a rank outsider: rich beyond dreams but nowhere near the VIP enclosure.
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