Do you have to take the Ballon d'Or election seriously?

No, it's just a prestigious ego-boosting gimmick, like being voted World Player of the Year.

The Ballon d'Or is organized by the French specialist newspaper "France Football", the other event by the International Football Association FIFA.

They did it together for a short time.

But the whole thing could also be marketed several times.

And that's why there have been more and more awards.

Among other things, the best team of the year is also honored.

One might think such a choice would be decided by success on the pitch.

That would be logical.

But football is not that simple.

Real Madrid won the Champions League, the European Super Cup and the Spanish championship - and now finished third behind Manchester City and Liverpool FC in the Ballon d'Or.

You don't have to understand that.

But not only the Spaniards are surprised.

Mané would also have been a good choice

After all, this time striker Karim Benzema has hit the right person for the individual prize.

However, an election in which neither Cristiano Ronaldo nor Lionel Messi plays a role is longer than the year in which Bayern Munich did not become German champion.

Between 2008 and 2017, these two worked it out.

In 2018, Luka Modrić surprisingly intervened because the World Cup had not gone well for either Ronaldo or Messi.

The Frenchman Mbappé seemed a bit too young at the time.

After that, apart from the Corona year 2020, it was Messi's turn again, which was seen as a strange decision last year.

Now he is no longer in the list of 30 candidates, which also seems strange.

The last time this happened Ronaldo was still playing for Real Madrid - albeit the Brazilian, not the Portuguese.

That was in 2005.

Benzema earned the award on the pitch.

But hardly anyone would associate him with a comprehensive role model.

That would be daring.

Benzema was sentenced to a year's probation in 2021 for attempting to extort a colleague, a very bizarre story.

In the club rating, a club should be evaluated for everything it does, including with regard to the advancement of women.

Why Manchester City was chosen remains a mystery.

If a holistic view played a role, then in the individual classification, runner-up Sadio Mané would have been a choice that would have suited football damn well.

Not because he's playing for FC Bayern now, but because he's not delusional about putting an insane fleet of vehicles in his garage or flaunting his wealth in any other way.

Mané prefers to finance social projects in his home country.

But there was only one special prize for this.

And so it was one moment in particular that will be remembered: when Sébastien Haller, the Borussia Dortmund striker who was suffering from testicular cancer, presented an award.

According to the circumstances, he is doing well after the chemotherapy, things are going according to plan.

Hopefully everyone, the honorees and those deeply offended by their ignorance, realized at that moment: All the rest is unimportant.