The French striker receives the trophy recognizing him as the best footballer of a season in which he elevated Real Madrid to the League and Champions League
Karim Benzema already has the Golden Ball that places him on the throne as the best footballer of the 2021-22 season. At the Châtelet Theater in Paris, the striker received the prestigious award presented by the magazine ‘France Football’, which pays tribute to the sensational last season that the Bron striker completed, in which he took Real Madrid to the league titles, champions and the Spanish Super Cup catapulted with 44 goals and 15 assists in the Frenchman’s 46 appearances. He becomes the fifth French player to receive this recognition since it was awarded in 1956 and the first since Zinedine Zidane joined Olympus in 1998.
“I am very proud. I remember when I was a child, all the incessant work, and for me it was a dream like any child. I have always had it in my head. Then I found the motivation. I have good role models had in my life: Zizou, Ronaldo… It’s the result of a lot of work, training, effort… But above all, it’s the pursuit of a dream I’ve had in my head since I was a kid. Anything is possible, for It has been very difficult for me, I have achieved it, it has not been easy,” said the great protagonist of the evening after receiving the trophy from Zidane, one of his biggest supporters for all those years.
Radiant with happiness and visibly moved at a gala in which the football world almost unanimously bowed to his enormous talent, Benzema took over from Leo Messi, winner of the previous year, after comfortably winning the votes against the Senegalese Sadio Mané and the Belgian Kevin De Bruyne, the other members of a podium whose top step was finally awarded when Real Madrid were declared champions of Europe for the fourteenth time on May 28 at the nearby Stade de France.
The fifteen goals with which he heralded the triumphant journey of the whites to the most magical Champions League in memory, added to the 27 goals that allowed him to become the Pichichi of the League for the first time, constituted the definitive assault on the pinnacle of football in Benzema, a nine with the soul of a ten who, after nearly a decade of being Cristiano Ronaldo’s perfect squire, took advantage of the Funchal star’s departure to reclaim Real Madrid’s flagship status, his immense class with a voracious goalscoring typical of the greatest predators of all time and a leadership capacity that was providence for the Chamartín team to once again dominate the old continent with an iron fist.
Thirteen years after Florentino Pérez went to his hometown to personally convince him that he should sign with Real Madrid and thus transform him into one of the great claims upon his return to the presidency, the Lyon native shines with his own light in the Balloon Winners’ list de Oro, the eighth player of the Chamartín club to gain entry to the select club inaugurated 66 years ago by Briton Stanley Matthews and whose payroll includes other deities venerated by Real Madrid such as Alfredo Di Stéfano, Raymond Kopa, Luis Figo, Ronaldo Nazário , Fabio Cannavaro, Cristiano Ronaldo or Luka Modric, all of whom hung the trophy in the white coat.
Awarded in 2018, the tireless Croatian midfielder was the only one to have dared to talk about the bicephaly imposed on Cristiano Ronaldo and Leo Messi between 2008, the year the Portuguese added the first of the five Ballon d’Ors he cherished , and 2021, when the Argentine made his name in the annals of the trophy for the seventh time after an edition, that of 2020, which had remained vacant due to the Covid-19 pandemic and with Robert Lewandowski as the prominent favourite.
The throne of the Rosario attacker is now in the hands of Benzema, a prophet in his country who follows in the footsteps of other Frenchmen such as the aforementioned Kopa (winner of the Ballon d’Or in 1958 and member of that Real Madrid team that won five European Cups in a row), Michel Platini (triple winner in 1983, 1984 and 1985, when he was the flag player for Juventus and for France, owner of the European Championship that hosted it), Jean-Pierre Papin (winner in 1991 as star of that Olympique de Marseille who came second in Europe) and Zinedine Zidane (crowned in 1998 after winning the World Cup that year with the French team and then a Juventus figure). The player whose hunting skills Jose Mourinho compared to a cat’s is football’s new ‘golden kitty’.
Classification of the Ballon d’Or 2022
1. Karim Benzema (Real Madrid)
2. Sadio Mane (Liverpool/Bayern Munich)
3. Kevin DeBruyne (Manchester City)
4. Robert Lewandowski (Bayern Munich/Barcelona)
5. Mohammed Salah (Liverpool)
6. Kylian Mbappe (PSG)
7. Thibaut Courtois (Real Madrid)
8. Vinicius (Real Madrid)
9. Luka Modric (Real Madrid)
10. Erling Haaland (Borussia Dortmund/Manchester City)
11. Heung Min Son (Tottenham)
12. Riyad Mahrez (Manchester City)
13. Sebastien Haller (Ajax/Borussia Dortmund)
14. Rafael Leao (Milan)
Fabinho (Liverpool)
16. Virgil van Dijk (Liverpool)
17. Casemiro (Real Madrid/Manchester United)
Dusan Vlahovic (Fiorentina/Juventus)
Luis Diaz (Porto/Liverpool)
20. Cristiano Ronaldo (Manchester United)
21. Harry Kane (Tottenham)
22. Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool)
Phil Foden (Manchester City)
Bernardo Silva (Manchester City)
25. Darwin Nunez (Benfica/Liverpool)
Christopher Nkunku (RB Leipzig)
Joao Cancelo (Manchester City)
Antonio Rudiger (Chelsea/Real Madrid)
Mike Maignan (Milan)
Joshua Kimmich (Bayern Munich)
Source: La Verdad
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