Dutch international defender Virgil van Dijk hopes the Champions League title he won last season with Liverpool will be enough to beat Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in the race for the best footballer on the continent.
UEFA will announce the successor to Luka Modric on Thursday in Monaco on the sidelines of the Champions League draw.
A team of 80 coaches for clubs in the Champions League and Europa League last season, along with 55 journalists, chose the trio to compete for the award.
Van Dyck, 28, deserved to be named in the final list, winning the Champions League at the expense of Tottenham in the final.He was named the best player in the Premier League, becoming the first defender to win since John Terry with Chelsea in 2005.
The Dutch also won the European Super Cup with Liverpool at the expense of Chelsea on penalties, in addition to leading the Netherlands to be runners-up champion of the first edition of the European Championship.
Messi, 32, led Barcelona to La Liga with 36 goals and La Liga top scorer with 12 goals, but was knocked out of the semi-finals by Copa America by Brazil.
For his part, Ronaldo, 34, succeeded in his first season with Juventus to win the league title, which he monopolized the last season for the eighth consecutive season (Portugal scored 21 goals in the league and ranked fourth on the list of scorers).
The Portuguese star, who was named the best player in Italy, led his country to win the title of the first edition of the European Championship, but his career with Juventus in the Champions League ended in the quarter-finals by Ajax Amsterdam, Dutch, while Messi reached the semi-final before he Van Dyck, who has scored a remarkable number of figures, has been eliminated by Liverpool, notably allowing no rival player to dodge him for 64 games, including the 2018 and 2019 Champions League finals.
Last year, Modric won the Champions League with Real Madrid and finished runner-up to Croatia when he won the World Player of the Year award.
In the women's prize went to the Danish Wolfsburg player Bernel Harder.
Messi was the first to win the prize, which was launched by Wifa in 2011 before winning it again in 2015, while it was the Spanish Andres Iniesta in 2012 and the French Frank Ribery in 2013 before Ronaldo monopolized in 2014, 2016 and 2017.
In the women's team, the trio of French champions Lyon were chosen by the committee to compete for the continental prize.