Yamal criticises Ballon d'Or criteria and cites Messi and Ronaldo
Yamal names who deserves to win the Ballon d'Or
The full interview with young star Lamine Yamal aired on "Universo Valdano" on Movistar Plus, days after the first promotional clips went out. Early leaks had zeroed in on his remarks about the Ballon d'Or. The final version delivered something far bigger: his detailed and controversial take on the crisis surrounding individual awards.
Yamal came out swinging at how the Ballon d'Or winners are now assessed. As reported by the Spanish newspaper "Mundo Deportivo", he said: "This award is judged completely differently now. When Messi and Cristiano were around, everyone knew they were the best in the world, and so the award was limited to the two of them."
"The problem today is that people are now judging things that have nothing to do with the Ballon d'Or, such as saying, for example, that the award should go to a player from Paris Saint-Germain because he won the Champions League," he continued. "When you win the Champions League, they give the trophy to the team as the best group, and that is their deserved reward, but the individual award is something else entirely. It should be given to the best in the world, and that's it. Not given to a player just because he scored 80 goals, because whoever scores 80 goals receives the top scorer award. These are different things that people do not understand. The best is the one you enjoy watching as a commentator during the match and see as different from everyone else. And whenever the award returns to the genuinely best player, and not to the one who scores more or collects more titles, it will regain its true value."
From there the young star turned to the reality of modern football and why he sometimes walks off the pitch angry. "The way I grew up in football relied on watching matches in full from the first minute to the ninetieth," he stressed. "I did not open the apps to find out how much this player scored or how many assists he provided. Instead, everyone enjoyed the game, so you would watch a playmaker who might not score 20 goals but who represented an incredible pleasure, like Mesut Özil, whom I loved a lot."
"I think the current generation goes into matches through the apps to say: 'Lamine scored two goals and made two assists, so he played a great match,'" he added. "Whereas it happens to me in many matches that I feel I have put on an enjoyable display without scoring, and I go to sleep very happy because I know that football is not just about scoring a goal, but is the whole build-up from the moment the ball leaves the goalkeeper."
The behind-the-scenes of his family discussions after matches came next. "I arrive home sometimes angry, and my mother always asks me whether I am angry because I did not score, and I answer her that I would never be angry for that reason," Yamal explained. "Scoring is just a number in the statistics, whereas real anger comes over me if I did not touch the ball and did not enjoy playing. That is what annoys me the most."
Tactics were next on the agenda, and the Barcelona player laid bare the understanding with his teammates. "In training I always talk with Fermín, who is a player who prefers to move into the spaces, or with Eric and Joules, where I tell them that I prefer they overlap me on the inside, because if they do that then either they get in behind or they pull away from the covering position and so they do not bother me, and thus they take themselves out of the play," he said. "We always try to discuss these details, because the simplest things in football are the most effective. When a player runs towards the space and the defences stop, there is one second in which he will be free of marking, and it is precisely this second that we must train for and time with precision."
