Cristiano Ronaldo has won the prestigious ‘World player of the year’ award from World Soccer magazine, after journalist from around the world cast their votes for the Real Madrid superstar ahead of Barcelona’s Lionel Messi and Franck Ribery of Bayern Munich.
The top three are also finalists for the FIFA Ballon d’Or to be announced next month. Ronaldo scored a total of 1,075 points, whilst Messi scored 926 and Ribery, 870.
The top 10 players in the list include – Zlatan Ibrahimovic , Arjen Robben, Neymar, Philipp Lahm, Robin Van Persie, Gareth Bale and Robert Lewandowski.
It is usually seen that the recipient of the World Soccer Magazine award goes on to win the Ballon D’Or award as well, as both awards have been won by the same player 14 times in the last 16 years.
The parallelism observed since 1997, when Brazilian Ronaldo won both the awards and the feat was repeated further by Zinedine Zidane, Rivaldo, Luis Figo, Micahel Owen, Ronaldo, Pavel Nedved, Ronaldinho, Fabio Cannavaro, Kaka, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi (2009, 2011 and 2012).
The only two times it didn’t happen were in 2004 & 2010, when Andriy Shevchenko and Leo Messi won instead of Ronaldinho and Xavi Hernandez, both won the World Soccer award that year.
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