Yang Yang won the inaugural FIFA Golden Ball Award!
As the grand ceremony at the Zurich Opera House came to an end, the news spread across the world in an extremely short time. Fans everywhere received the news almost instantly, sparking heated discussion.
Yang Yang was the best player in world football. That was an indisputable fact and something recognized around the globe. But in this World Cup year, China Team had been eliminated in the Round of 16, while Yang Yang had won the FIFA Golden Ball Award. This was undoubtedly something many people found impossible to accept.
By convention, in a World Cup year, the World Footballer of the Year came from the World Cup-winning team. That was a consensus shared by everyone. Yang Yang's victory this year had completely shattered that consensus, which had stood for the past twenty years. Naturally, it sparked heated debate.
Especially after FIFA publicly released the voting details, the discussion became even more intense.
According to the votes, Yang Yang's overall share was around twenty-two percent, considerably higher than that of second-place Messi and third-place Iniesta, though his advantage was not especially significant.
Under the selection method used for the inaugural FIFA Golden Ball Award, if the three groups of votes were considered separately, Yang Yang ranked first in the votes from national-team head coaches and captains. However, he ranked only fourth in the media vote, behind Sneijder, Iniesta, and Xavi.
In other words, under the selection method used in previous years, Yang Yang would at most have won FIFA's World Footballer of the Year award, while France Football Magazine's European Golden Ball Award would have gone to Sneijder, who had ranked first in the media vote.
The outside world had largely reached a consensus on this matter. After all, the selections