None of this matters. That’s always the first thing to remember about individual awards. Some people will get the excited by who wins, a lot more people will complain about it, but the fundamental fact is that Luka Modric’s success is an irrelevance. Most individual awards, whether awarded by a panel of judges or by a vote, are silly but can just about be tolerated in some industries because of the publicity they raise and because they encourage stakeholders to consider what they value. Football, more than perhaps any other ball sport, is a team game: celebrating an individual within that context is not merely illogical but actively contrary to the greater ideals of the game. And publicity? Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo would probably have been pretty famous anyway without their array of individual gongs.
