How to make the awful Best FIFA Football Awards better, in 2 simple steps
Good news: FIFA has addressed its sexism problem with The Best FIFA Football Awards.
Bad news: They did it by making the men’s awards equally bad.
Since FIFA started handing out an individual women’s award, fans have complained about deserving players getting left off the nominees list. The winner is rarely the most accomplished player in the world for that season. This didn’t change in 2018, but what was a bit different was the entire awards ceremony turning into a joke.
And it seemed like everyone could see the joke coming before the punchline even landed. There was less buzz for the awards than ever before. Fans weren’t feverishly debating the winners in the build-up. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi didn’t even bother to attend. FIFA’s once prestigious awards are quickly becoming irrelevant.
The easy reaction to this is: Who gives a shit? It’s just a dumb awards show, after all. But if you have that reaction, that’s a bit of a problem for FIFA, who probably does very much give a shit about their awards being taken seriously.
Right now, there’s no reason to take them even the slightest bit seriously. Let’s look at the reasons why Monday night was a farce.
Mohamed Salah wins the Puskas award for the second-best goal in England last December
Here’s the goal. It is a nice goal.
It’s not the best of the nominated goals. It’s not as good as the Jermain Defoe goal that won Premier League goal of the month for the month it was scored in. But the Puskas award is a popularity contest, and Salah, as the most popular Muslim footballer in the world, had a much larger voting base than anyone else.
Thibaut Courtois wins goalkeeper of the year ... and misses the best XI.
How does this happen? Pretty easily, actually! The Best XI is done by player vote, while the goalkeeper of the year award has media and fan vote components. De Gea’s peers believe he’s the best goalkeeper in the world, but he wasn’t even a finalist for the goalkeeper of the year award. FIFA’s system has come to the conclusion that Courtois, despite not being the best goalkeeper in the Premier League last season or the best goalkeeper at Real Madrid currently, is the best goalkeeper on earth. Astonishing.
Another thing about that Best XI
There’s someone else missing. Mohamed Salah, who finished in the top three of voting for The Best FIFA Men’s Player, did not make the Best XI. He got shoved out by Kylian Mbappe and Eden Hazard, who were not finalists for the big individual award.
Marta wins The Best FIFA Women’s Player for reasons unknown
The NWSL season doesn’t line up perfectly with the window that’s supposed to be considered by voters, which makes the women’s award a bit messy. Rather than a full season, they had to consider the second half of Marta’s 2017 campaign and the first half of her 2018 season. But by no measure was she the best player in NWSL during that window. She wasn’t Brazil’s best player at the 2017 Tournament of Nations or 2018 Copa America, either. If she wasn’t famous for winning the award on five previous occasions, it’s difficult to see how anyone would come up with the idea to nominate her as one of the 10 best performing players during the award window.
It would be very cool if these awards could be taken seriously. Players deserve recognition for their accomplishments and awards generally drive interest in sports. But if this is what we’re going to get, why bother paying attention?
The good news is that FIFA can fix their awards pretty easily if they want to. They just have to do two things.
1. Create a consistent voting system
Just decide all of the awards the same way. If one is decided by player vote, another by fan vote and yet another by media or combination vote, you end up with the kinds of terrible inconsistencies these awards had. Just decide all of the awards the same way and you’re golden.
2. Get voters who care
Every national team captain and coach gets a vote, which seems like a very fair way of making sure each of FIFA’s members gets a say and this isn’t just a party for central Europe. The problem is that most coaches and players have to do their jobs, which generally does not involve watching a lot of soccer that is on several time zones away while they are sleeping. A lot of players and coaches don’t get to watch a ton of the games in their own countries either, since they’re going on at the same time as when they’re playing, coaching and traveling.
The problem is exacerbated in women’s soccer, which has a big global access problem in addition to the usual constraints that prevent players and coaches from watching a lot of men’s soccer. It would take a hell of a lot of effort for players and coaches in Asia, Africa and South America to watch every NWSL and UEFA Women’s Champions League game, which is why the women’s player of the year vote often devolves into a popularity contest with little weight given to accomplishments from the past year.
Maybe FIFA can’t fix global distribution of soccer league rights or time zones, but it can fix who gets to vote. Instead of handing out an automatic vote to the manager and captain of each national team, it should pick a coach and player from each country who commit to taking their voting privilege seriously. That simple action — shifting the votes from people who didn’t ask for them to people who say they care — should improve the process significantly.
https://www.sbnation.com/soccer/2018/9/25/17900990/the-best-fifa-football-awards-2018-bad-dumb-horrible-joke
Tidak ada komentar