Forget Vinícius Junior - only a Man City player deserves to win 2024 Ballon d'Or

The list of 2024 Ballon d’Or nominees is out and based on the early betting, we have seven weeks to try and persuade the 100 global journalists who will decide the men’s winner to do the right thing – and finally give the award to a defensive player again.

Right now, Real Madrid forward Vinícius Junior is the frontrunner, with the bookmakers making him odds-on favourite to win the most prestigious individual award in the men’s game. He would be a worthy winner on numerous levels, but not necessarily the right one.

The Brazilian has had a hugely impressive 2023/24 season, scoring 24 goals in 39 matches as his club won La Liga and the Champions League. He is unquestionably among the finest players in the game right now, and has achieved an immense amount despite enduring grotesque and seemingly ceaseless racist abuse from the stands of Spanish stadiums. The only argument against his winning the award is that he isn’t Rodri.

It has been 28 years since the voting panel last gave the award to a defensive player of any since. Since Fabio Cannavaro won in 2006 off the back of Italy’s World Cup win and a Serie A title with Juventus (which was stripped afterwards in the wake of the Calciopoli scandal), the award has been justly dominated by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo but even on the three occasions those two greats were passed over, the Ballon d’Or was handed to another forward or attacking midfielder – Kaká, Luka Modrić and Karim Benzema.

Now, for the first time in 21 long years, neither Messi (eight wins) nor Ronaldo (five) have been nominated. Both are inching towards a retirement that they are staving off in the United States and Saudi Arabia respectively, but there is little argument for either to still be described as the best in the world. This is a new age, and a chance for the voters to finally give other players their due.

Vinícius will likely win it sooner or later and will deserve it, and the same is true of Kylian Mbappé and Jude Bellingham, all players that have made it their turn to take over the mantle of the modern greats of the game. But no player over the past couple of years has won more and been more instrumental in those wins than Manchester City’s Rodri.

When the Spaniard plays, Manchester City win. When he doesn’t, it’s less certain. Last season, as they made their way to a record-breaking fourth consecutive Premier League title, they lost three matches. Rodri was suspended for all three. Spain, meanwhile, in the year running up to their victory at the European Championships in the summer, lost just one match, a meaningless friendly against Colombia. Guess who was left out?

The only match Rodri played in and lost last season was the FA Cup final against Manchester United, a match whose result seems more freakish with each passing week of the new season. When they were knocked out of the Champions League by Real Madrid, it was on penalties, and the match proper was drawn. When Rodri plays, his teams win, and the correlation between his presence and his team’s success is absolutely not a coincidence. Sometimes, correlation and causation co-exist.

This is a player who has a 92% passing success rate while averaging over 110 passes every game he plays. A ‘defensive midfielder’ who creates over five shooting chances a match and who gets the ball into dangerous areas constantly and accurately, while seldom allowing anyone to get past him easily and who turned the ball over eight times a match in the Premier League last season.

All of which are raw statistics which tell you that he’s quite brilliant and which are utterly unnecessary if you only watch him play. He dominates opposing midfields and runs matches in a way that very, very few midfielders in the history of the game can come close to matching. And yet he will likely be overlooked.

Last year, he came fifth in the voting, behind Messi (understandably after the World Cup), Mbappé and two of his own team-mates, but while you could make an argument for Erling Haaland and Kevin de Bruyne being just as important to the treble-winning team of 2022/23 (especially if you have the bias towards attacking players that the panel seem to) you simply can’t make a case for anyone else as being so critical this year.

The award is also usually heavily influenced by the results of major competitions and here, Rodri surely ‘wins’ as well. Isn’t a European Championship more valuable than a Champions League medal, after all? It’s surely supposed to be. Assuming Vinícius does win over Rodri, then it will tell us either that the voters disagree with that sentiment, or that they think that the Brazilian has been clearly better (which would be pretty preposterous), or that attacking players should win the big awards. The latter is the most plausible reason to give Vinícius the award over Rodri.

And that’s the real crux of the problem. Strikers score the goals, so they get all the glory and plaudits while defenders, who merely prevent them, are swept aside. If you are going to give an award for the best player, then it should surely be weighted to ensure all positions and assignments on the pitch are treated equally, but it’s deeply obvious that that is not the case. Defenders and holding midfielders deserve love too, but they best they can hope for is a place in the top three behind someone with a more glamorous role. An entire half of the game, every bit as integral to the grand dance of a football match, is being undervalued. That does the complexity and balance of the sport itself a disservice, never mind just the poor defensive players themselves.

Vinícius is a brilliant player. Rodri is a brilliant player. Both have achieved an immense amount and played quite extraordinarily well in the process. But it’s the latter who is setting an entirely new historical standard for his position, and hitting a level that perhaps no player in that mould has ever reached. And while Real Madrid would be a lesser team if Vinícius wasn’t there, they would still be able to replace him adequately. Can Manchester City say the same? For once, let’s give the big gongs to someone who doesn’t spend too much time in the penalty area, and give it to the man who makes the most difference instead.