Man Utd, Aston Villa & West Ham stars are all up for Puskás Award – but none of them deserve win

The nominations for the 2024 Puskás Award are finally out – 11 of the greatest goals scored from around the global game from the past year, one of which will go down in history. And if history is any guide, the voters will probably make the wrong choice.

Four Premier League sides have players in the race, although only two of their goals were scored in their current club’s colours – Southampton’s Paul Onuachu scored a superb improvised aerial backheel while he was on loan with Trabzonspor and Aston Villa winger Jaden Philogene-Bidace’s Rabona came for Hull City last season. Alejandro Garnacho’s obscene overhead kick against Everton is the only goal nominated from the Premier League itself, while Mohamed Kudus’ fine solo goal against Freiburg came in European competition.

Garnacho may well have an enormous advantage here. The Puskás Award is decided by a public vote, which means that players who are especially popular or play for bigger teams get a big leg up in the voting – take the 2018 edition of the award, which was given to Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah despite the fact that his goal, superb as it was, was almost objectively the least impressive of the nominees. Between fans of his club and his compatriots, however, Salah stormed the popular vote.

You can’t trust people, as a noted television philosopher once told us. They like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. Super Hans knew people, and that quote predates Brexit and Donald Trump. There is a very good chance that Garnacho’s goal will win largely because it was a goal scored by a player from one of the world’s most popular teams.

In fairness, Garnacho winning the award would not be an injustice on a par with Salah’s victory, which remains a sop offering earned for achievements elsewhere in his extraordinary career. His bicycle kick would be a worthy winner in most years. Even taking it on required a ludicrous degree of audacity, and the technique was impeccable. That doesn’t mean it was the best goal of the bunch.

Onuachu wouldn’t be the worst winner imaginable either, although one wonders whether a goal born of sheer necessity, a moment of magical improvisation which wasn’t envisioned from the start but which happened because the ball coming in was way too high and he had to try something, should really win out over a piece of pre-meditated brilliance like Garnacho’s goal.

Kudus’ goal was pretty damned good, but it wasn’t quite Diego Maradona against England back in 1986. He beat three players on a long run, but it’s hard not to shake the feeling that he probably should have been tackled on the way. Kudus did everything right, but there wasn’t that Maradona-esque sense that absolutely nobody could have gotten near him.

A lot of people will probably vote for Jaden Philogene-Bidace’s strike too, a Rabona from an improbable angle into the top corner of Rotherham United’s goal – but should his effort come out on top, it will generate an irrational volume of anger in at least one football correspondent. That, you see, was an own goal.

Would his Rabona have gone in without the assistance of an unintended flick off of Roterham’s Cameron Humphreys? Surely not. It went down as Philogene-Bidace’s goal because nobody had the heart to take it away from him, but this writer is prepared to die on the hill that it should have been taken away from him. To take nothing away from the daring and technique involved in the goal, or from a very fine young player’s undoubted talent, that particular goal owed as much to luck as to excellence. It is the smallest of hills to die on, and yet here we are, ready for the end.

In any case, the single biggest reason that none of those goals, wonderful (or jammy) as they were in their own ways, should win this year’s Puskás Award is because one of the contenders is simply better than the others. There are ten goals that make the watcher go ‘wow’. Then there is one that is so astounding that it makes one swear at the screen in amazement. That is Denis Omedi’s goal for KCCA.

His angled Rabona kick, struck with remarkable force and the perfect amount of dip from an angle which would make Marco van Basten think twice, is simply breathtaking, a piece of skill that hardly any player in the world would consider, less still be capable of executing.

In a sane and just world, it would win this award hands down. Regrettably, our world is neither sane nor just, and Omedi will only win if the world’s voters set aside club and national loyalties and vote for a goal scored in the Ugandan Super 8 league. Omedi is the deserving minnow in a pond full of larger fish. It will be an uphill battle for him to claim a crown that is rightly his.

If the result of a public vote was always fair, Omedi would surely win. As it is, the smart money is probably on Garnacho, and we can only remember the old cliché, often wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill, which claims that democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the other ones we’ve tried.

After all, while one can’t trust the public to do the right thing, the alternative could be Gianni Infantino picking the winner himself – and when it comes to a matter of trust, he isn’t the first name on the team sheet.