FIFA Ballon d'Or - Seb Goffe

With Christmas only weeks away it's the season for handing out shiny baubles, and in particular the brand new FIFA Ballon d'Or. This award is the combination of two older awards: the Ballon d'Or (or "Golden Ball" in English) awarded by France Football magazine and voted for by journalists, and the FIFA World Player of the Year award voted for by international coaches and captains. Bringing the two together under one name makes a lot of sense, especially since the European requirement for the old Ballon d'Or was scrapped in 2007. The fact that it is decided over a calendar year rather than a football season has always struck me as a little odd, but it does at least give us something to get worked up about over the cold winter months.

A shortlist of 23 players were named back in October, and now the top three have been decided: Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta and Xavi, all of Barcelona. This is the first time all three finalists have been from the same club since 1989, and is yet another sign of how Pep Guardiola's Barcelona side have dominated the football landscape in the past couple of years. All three are fantastic players, but I do feel sorry for poor Wesley Sneijder of Holland and Inter Milan, who many had tipped to win the award. A man who led his club side to the treble of League, Cup and Champions League as well as scoring five goals in the World Cup and dragging his team to the final must wonder what else he could have done.

There has been enough talk in recent weeks about the mysterious workings of FIFA, but it is all too easy to point to Iniesta's World Cup Final winning goal as the main reason for his inclusion in the final three. His season for Barcelona was good but not exactly great, with most of his appearances coming from the subs bench, and in truth the success of his team had a lot more to do with his fellow nominees Xavi and Messi. A World Cup win is of course the crowning achievement in any player's career, and it's understandable that FIFA want their flagship event given prime importance, but taking the calendar year as a whole it is hard to see how Iniesta deserves the award more than Sneijder.

Grumbling aside, my vote for the eventual winner has to go to Xavi, a true great of the modern game. While Messi dominates the headlines with his phenomenal goalscoring record, for me the real star of Barcelona and Spain is the midfield maestro Xavi, whose precise passing is crucial to the way both teams play. In the World Cup he attempted an incredible 669 passes (over a hundred more than the next highest passer), and he has been doing this for years, calmly and quietly providing the ammunition for his more celebrated team mates. When he was nominated for the World Player of the Year award in 2009 the Daily Mail printed the laughable headline "The best players of the world (and Xavi)" but there can be no doubting his quality now.

Messi has been crowned the world's greatest before and will no doubt win the award again in the future, but this year there is no-one more deserving than Xavi. He should win on the merits of this year alone, but also for his career as a whole and the impact he has had. Ideally I would have Sneijder second and Messi in third, but working with the shortlist as it is it has to be Xavi-Messi-Iniesta. I can hardly wait until January 10th to see if I'm right!

Seb Goffe is the author of the Stadium School series, written with Cindy Jefferies.