Karim Benzema is already the fifth French footballer to win the Ballon d’Or and the first to do so since Zinédine Zidane in 1998. The Frenchman stood at the top of a podium completed by Sadio Mané in second position and Kevin de Bruyne in third. The fourth was Lewandowski and the fifth was Moh Salah. This is the twelfth time that a Real Madrid player has won this trophy. Manchester City won the award for the best team of the season ahead of Liverpool and Real Madrid. Courtois took the award for the best goalkeeper. The Belgian was seventh in the general classification.
Rarely had a player been so favored for the most coveted individual prize in the world of football after a season in which the striker was the great star of a Real Madrid team that ended up winning the League and the Champions League.
And it is that Benzema’s statistics summarize the best year of his career: he scored 42 goals in 44 games, at an average of 0.95 goals per game. In the League he was the Pichichi and scored 27 goals in 31 games; in the Champions League he left his mark with 15 goals in 12 games and he also scored in the Super Cup.
If the Champions League is the competition that gives and takes the most honors, this has been Benzema’s: with goals and assists of all colors and interventions such as his harassment of Donnarumma that led to the draw against PSG, (key because it was the start of the first of the comebacks) and the first of his two hat-tricks. The second was in the first leg at Stamford Bridge against Chelsea. He also scored the penalty with which he sentenced Manchester City and gave the Whites a pass to the final in Paris.
However, in the case of Benzema, the importance he has for Madrid’s game goes beyond his goals. In fact, the Frenchman has always considered that in football “goals are overrated”, in the most fortunate phrase of a man always sparing in words and where his appearances on social networks are rather to remember his status as Muslim.
Marginalized in the beginning by Mourinho, who to make fun of him said that “going hunting with him is like going with a cat”, plagued for four years for the French team by the Valbuena case (involved in a dark plot of sexual blackmail), and close to turning 35, Benzema is definitely valued today. “Whoever likes football should like Benzema”, Zidane declared after a run by the Frenchman without scoring. Today is the Ballon d’Or.
