Jan. 11: Argentina’s Lionel Messi won the World Player of the Year for the second time in a row on Monday and Jose Mourinho walked off with the coach’s award, leaving Spain’s World Cup winners disappointed. Messi surprisingly held off Barcelona teammates Andres Iniesta and Xavi, second and third respectively, to win the newly-created Fifa Ballon d’Or, a fusion of the previously separate annual awards handed out by Fifa and France football magazine.
Mourinho, now with Real Madrid, won the inaugural Coach of the Year award after leading Inter Milan to a Champions League, Serie A and Italian Cup treble. The honour went to the self-styled Special One, who described himself afterwards as “proudly Portuguese”, at the expense of Spain’s World Cup-winning coach Vicente del Bosque, second, and Barcelona’s Pep Guardiola, third.
“The most important trophies for me are the collective ones, not the individual ones but this is a historic trophy for me and Portuguese football,” Mourinho said after edging Del Bosque with 35.92 per cent of the votes against 33.08. Iniesta and Xavi had been favourites after helping Spain win last year’s World Cup while Messi had failed to score a goal or produce his best form at the tournament in South Afica. “It was just good to be here with my team mates,” said Messi, who looked as surprised as anyone by the result.
Spain’s only consolation was that they had six players in the world team of the year, Iniesta and Xavi joined by Iker Casillas, David Villa, Carles Puyol and Gerard Pique. A host of other awards were handed out by Fifa. South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, who used his church pulpit as a platform to help bring down apartheid, took the Fifa Presidential Award.
The Haitian team were given the Fair Play award for taking part in the Concacaf under-17 women’s championship in Costa Rica two months after a huge earthquake devastated their country last year. Fifa’s Goal of the Year award went to Turkey’s Hamit Altintop for a spectacular volley against Kazakhstan and Brazil’s Marta was named women’s Player of the Year for the fifth time in a row.