Why Erling Haaland deserved The Best FIFA Men's Player award

It stands to reason that the guy who scored the most goals in the team that won everything should be considered to have made the biggest impact in the year and be crowned the best.

That’s how 2023 went for Erling Haaland, with his monstrous haul of goals powering Manchester City to a Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League treble.

It was only the ninth time in 67 years of UEFA club competition that a team has managed that feat, with Haaland’s City just the second English outfit.

Manchester City have dominated English football in recent years, but having always failed to get over the line in Europe – snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the semi-final against Real Madrid in 2022 was their most spectacular collapse – there was almost a clear demarcation of before and after Haaland and, crucially, the difference that he was as the final piece of the puzzle that had ultimately been 15 years in the making since the very first day Sheikh Mansour opened his cheque book.

None of City's other signings ahead of last season had anything like his kind of impact, with Manuel Akanji the only other new arrival to command even a semi-regular place in the team.

Unfortunately for Haaland, the scale of his goalscoring is underappreciated because of how Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo skewed over many years the perceptions about what constitutes world class. Once upon a time, a striker might be lauded for scoring 30 goals in a season. But when Messi and Ronaldo were routinely getting to 50, 60 and in one season, even 73 (Messi in 2011/12), anything under 40 doesn't seem quite as impressive and even 50 has become normalised.

It is most definitely not normal to score that many goal in a season of elite club football.

Yet it was Messi who denied Haaland FIFA's honour as the best male player in the world on Monday.

The Argentine icon was named 2023's The Best FIFA Men's Player. His role in leading Argentina to World Cup glory actually fell outside the timeframe that voting national team captains, coaches and media representatives were asked to consider when they chose their respective top threes - 19 December 2022 to 20 August 2023 inclusive. But it's impossible to think of another reason why Messi would still have been in people's minds when casting their ballot.

After all, 2023 saw him leave Paris Saint-Germain to end a relatively unremarkable couple of club seasons by his standards and join Inter Miami for the back-end of the Major League Soccer season, during which time he scored one goal in six league games.

Messi had already won the 2023 Ballon d'Or, which allowably reflected his World Cup impact in Qatar, while the previous Best FIFA Men's Player in 2022 covered the tournament and he won that too. His achievement cannot be understated, but it just feels a little bit unfair to still be getting credit for something that happened outside the voting timeframe and for which he's already been honoured.

Haaland was second in both of world football's biggest individual awards in 2023 – there is an argument to suggest he was a worthy winner of the Ballon d'Or ahead of Messi even accounting for the World Cup – but was an awful lot closer in the FIFA ballot.

Once all votes from every national team captain, coach and media representative were counted, Messi and Haaland tallied the same points. The predetermined tiebreak then edged Messi ahead based on receiving a higher number of first-place rankings among the captains.

At the age of 23, Haaland's time will likely come again. But, even so, the close to perfect year he had in 2023 and all of the trophies that came with it will be almost impossible to replicate.

READ MORE ABOUT ERLING HAALAND'S FUTURE & GOALSCORING RECORDS HERE