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We have a new winner of the Guardian’s 100 best male footballers in the world, with Robert Lewandowski claiming top spot in a year ravaged by the coronavirus.
There was nothing that could stop Bayern’s No 9 in 2020. As he gets older, the Pole seems to get better and better and even more consistent. The stats are staggering. In 2020 he scored 45 goals in 40 games. He has 253 goals in 333 Bundesliga games. He was on target 15 times as Bayern won the Champions League, becoming the tournament’s top scorer.
No wonder he was the favourite among our 241 judges. He was the No 1 pick by 201 of them, the equivalent of 83%, a number no one has got close to since Messi got 100% in 2012 (there were only 11 people on the voting panel then). Another measure of how superior Lewandowski, now 32, has been in 2020, according to our judges, is that he beat Messi by a remarkable 1,405 points.
Lewandowski is also one of only 12 players who have been on every list since we started in 2012. The others? Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, of course, but also Neymar, Eden Hazard, Luka Modric, Sergio Agüero, Luis Suárez, Thiago Silva, Toni Kroos, Sergio Ramos and Karim Benzema.
Liverpool may have lost their Champions League crown to Bayern but they won the Premier League in emphatic fashion and have the most players on the list in 2020, one more than the Bundesliga champions.
The increase in the number of Liverpool players in the top 100 since Jürgen Klopp took over in 2015 is remarkable. It has gone from a single player (Philippe Coutinho) to 12. Chelsea, with their heavy recruitment in the summer, have also jumped up the list, going from three players in 2019 to five. There is a drop for Manchester City, with Pep Guardiola’s side having seven on the list, down from 11 in their title-winning campaigns of 2018 and 2019.
Bayern’s Champions League victory has contributed to Germany moving into top spot in terms of having the most players on the list. With 12 players they leapfrog France, England and Brazil, who drop from first to third. It remains to be seen whether Joachim Löw can make the most of the players at his disposal at next year’s Euro 2020. The recent 6-0 defeat to Spain seems to suggest he has not been doing so.
Three countries are represented for the first time, with Alphonso Davies, Dominik Szoboszlai and Thomas Partey making sure that Canada, Hungary and Ghana join the other 44 with players in the top 100.
The average age drops slightly, from 27.56 to 27.25 despite Zlatan Ibrahimovic, at 39, and Jesús Navas, at 35 a re-entry, making the list. At the other end of the spectrum are two 18-year-olds in Rennes’ Eduardo Camavinga and Barcelona’s Ansu Fati.
The Premier League is again the most represented league with 35 players – down two from 2019. The Bundesliga makes a big leap from eight last year to 15 in 2020, three behind its best score of 18 in 2013.
It is not only players from Bayern who make up the Bundesliga total – although 11 are from the champions – with RB Leipzig contributing two after their Champions League run and Borussia Dortmund two as well.
In France, Rennes, Monaco and Lyon are represented on the list but the lion’s share from Ligue 1 inevitably comes from Paris Saint-Germain, who have six.
A peek below the top 100 shows the players who just missed out: Koke in 101st, Stefan de Vrij 102nd, Gabriel Barbosa 103rd. They all got almost 100 points but it was not enough.
Other players to get a lot of votes but not enough points include Dejan Kulusevski (106), Paul Pogba (109), Adama Traoré (114) and Iago Aspas (120). In total 315 players received votes with Kaoru Mitoma, Yeferson Soteldo, Jordan Larsson, Yann Sommer, Hirving Lozano, Jens Petter Hauge, Yannick Carrasco, Vedat Muriqi, Rodrigo Moreno, Lukas Hradecky and Jan Vertonghen getting a single one each.
Finally, we say goodbye to two players who had been on the list since the beginning: Edinson Cavani and Sergio Busquets. They did get votes this year, but not enough to make the list. And who knows, they may have stellar years in 2021 and return.
But for now the glory belongs to one man and that is Robert Lewandowski.
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