Thirty-two seasons were on the ballot. Ten of the greatest players who ever lived, every one of them a Ballon d’Or winner at least twice. Johan Cruyff’s 1970s, Michel Platini’s hat-trick of awards, Marco van Basten, Ronaldo Nazário, and eight separate years of Lionel Messi.
On 28 October, France Football announced the winner of its new Ballon d’Or of All Time, a fan vote on the single greatest Ballon d’Or-winning season in history. It was not one of Messi’s years. It was Cristiano Ronaldo, aged 23, at Manchester United, in 2007-08.
Fan votes can be argued with, and this one will be. But on this question, the fans got it right. Here is why.
Forty-Two Goals From the Wing
Start with the number that still does not look real. Ronaldo scored 42 goals in 49 games that season, and he was not a striker. He started most games wide, a winger with tricks, who had spent his first years at Old Trafford being told he held on to the ball too long.
In 2007-08 he held on to it exactly as long as he needed to. He scored 31 in the Premier League, which won him the Golden Boot by seven goals and equalled Alan Shearer’s record for a 38-game season. Eight more came in the Champions League, where he was the top scorer. In March he drew level with George Best’s club record of 32 goals in a season from midfield, and then he kept going.
His 31 league goals were also worth 62 points in the European Golden Shoe, the prize for the top scorer in all of Europe’s leagues. It is usually won by a centre-forward. That year it went to a winger.
The Nights That Built the Season
There was the first hat-trick of his United career, three goals in a 6-0 win over Newcastle at Old Trafford in January. There was a goal in Rome in the quarter-final, the night United went to the Stadio Olimpico and won 2-0.
And there was the title race, which went to the final day. United and Chelsea started it level on points, United ahead on goal difference. At Wigan, Ronaldo scored a penalty and Ryan Giggs added the second. United finished on 87 points to Chelsea’s 85. It was the league, and the 31st goal.
Ten days later came Moscow. The Champions League final against Chelsea, the first all-English final, at the Luzhniki Stadium. On 26 minutes Wes Brown crossed from the right and Ronaldo headed United in front. Frank Lampard equalised before half-time, and the night went to penalties.
Ronaldo took United’s third kick, and Petr Čech saved it. For a few minutes, the best season of his life was about to end with his miss. Then John Terry slipped as he struck what would have been the winning penalty, and it hit the post. Edwin van der Sar saved from Nicolas Anelka. United won 6-5. The man who had missed ended the night a European champion.
The season was not perfect because nothing went wrong. It was perfect because every time something did, he was still standing at the end.
Every Major Award Going
Then the prizes arrived, one after another. For 2007-08 and the year 2008, Ronaldo won:
- The Ballon d’Or, with 446 points to Messi’s 281 and Fernando Torres’s 179
- FIFA World Player of the Year, with 935 points to Messi’s 678
- The FIFPro World Player of the Year and World Soccer’s Player of the Year
- The Onze d’Or, ahead of Messi and Franck Ribéry
- UEFA Club Footballer of the Year
- The European Golden Shoe and the Premier League Golden Boot
- Premier League Player of the Season
- PFA Players’ Player of the Year, PFA Fans’ Player of the Year and the FWA Footballer of the Year
Two of those were history. He was the first Premier League player ever named FIFA World Player of the Year. He was also the first Manchester United player to win the Ballon d’Or since George Best in 1968.
To be fair to the record, it was not a clean sweep of everything. United went out of the FA Cup to Portsmouth and the League Cup to Coventry, and Portugal lost to Germany in the quarter-finals of Euro 2008. He missed a penalty in the semi-final at the Camp Nou as well as the one in Moscow. But in the competitions that decide a Ballon d’Or, the league and the Champions League, he won both, and he won every major individual award there was to win.
Messi’s 2012 Deserves Its Place
The season that came second, Messi’s 2012, is the strongest argument against all of this, and it deserves to be stated properly. In the calendar year of 2012 Messi scored 91 goals for Barcelona and Argentina, breaking Gerd Müller’s record for a calendar year. In the 2011-12 season he scored 73, including 50 in La Liga, a league record. He won his fourth Ballon d’Or in a row with 41.6 percent of the vote.
No player has ever scored like that. But goals are not the whole season. Barcelona won the Copa del Rey, yet in 2011-12 they lost the league to a Real Madrid side that reached 100 points, with Ronaldo scoring 46 of their league goals. They also went out of the Champions League in the semi-final, to Chelsea. Messi’s 2012 was the greatest scoring year ever. Ronaldo’s 2007-08 was the greatest winning one.
About That Vote
Be honest about how this was decided. It was a fan vote, each ballot cost one euro, and supporters could vote as many times as they liked. Only players with two or more Ballon d’Or wins were eligible, which left out single winners such as Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldinho, Kaká and Luka Modrić. Ronaldo and Messi took every one of the top 12 places between them. Ronaldo’s own 2017 finished third.
So the Ballon d’Or of All Time is not a jury’s verdict, and it was never going to settle the Messi and Ronaldo argument. Ronaldo’s reply was simple: “Football belongs to the fans!” But you do not need the vote to make the case. You only need the season.
The Verdict: Is It Really the Ballon d’Or of All Time?
Yes. Ronaldo’s 2007-08 deserves the Ballon d’Or of All Time because it had everything a season can have. The goals of a striker from a winger. A title won on the last day. A Champions League final where he scored, failed and still won. And at the end of it, every major individual award there was.
It was also the season that changed his life. A year later Real Madrid paid £80 million to bring him to the Bernabéu. There he scored more goals than anyone in the club’s history and won four more Ballons d’Or. But it started in Manchester, in 2007-08, with the year he stopped being a talent and became the best player in the world. Your turn. Pick your side
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