Taylor Swift

I play football every Monday with my older bros. One of them wears a Ronaldo shirt everytime he plays and is constantly saying that he's the BPITW so we have endless Ronaldo v Messi arguments. Translation: I could go on forever, man.

The Thai guy voted for Villa, Forlan and Klose. This is why our country is shit. Anyway, Messi scored the most goals for a team that posted the highest points tally in La Liga history. He was also the top scorer in the CL, and imo the CL is harder to win than the WC because the quality of players in the CL is higher. Saying that, Xavi had an immense season as well. He was a constant presence in the middle of the park for a pretty much transcendental team, and also won the WC with Spain. He would have been a worthy winner as well. Iniesta, on the other hand, was injured for quite a bit at the start of the season, and didn't have as spectacular a WC as many other players (Villa was probably Spain's best player, imo), but he gets in because of one goal. He's a great, great player, but Sneijder, Robben or Milito should have been in the final shortlist. Sneijder did have a pretty insane season. He scored an important goal in the CL semis, his pass for Eto'o against Chelsea knocked them out, he put Robben through in the WC final with a peach of a pass, but I don't think he starred in the world cup even though he was credited with 5 goals - one of the goals was actually an own goal but it's obviously much better for fifa to credit an offensive player for it. The fact that Inter had a historic season should count for a lot, though, so Sneijder would have been a worthy winner as well. And then you have Robben, who had a spectacular season for Bayern. He pretty much transformed them, scoring crucial goals along the way, knocking out Fiorentina and Man Utd with great strikes and scoring a couple of goals in the WC too. And his presence on the pitch affected other teams so much that I rate his year higher than Sneijder's. I also think a fit Ribery in the CL final makes this a Messi vs Robben discussion, so Robben would have been a worthy winner as well. A lot of players had great years but I don't think you can complain when the best player in the world wins an award after completing a historically brilliant season. For this ongoing season, I think it'll be a clear Cristiano v Messi competition for the award. I also think the PL should be concerned with the lack of players represented. Rooney had a great season but an injury cost him the latter part of the season and his woeful form in the WC doomed him. Drogba likewise had a great season but Chelsea getting knocked out early in the CL probably cost him a real shot at winning it.

Milito arguably had a better season than Sneijder. I know Sneijder played well in midfield but Milito was the dog's bollocks in all the big matches. Without him you'd have whimpered out of the CL semis, lost to Roma in the Copa Italia and drawn a couple of your matches at the end of the year, giving the title away.

had their votes split*

Ironically xavi and iniesta probably had their votes by all the people who wanted to honour spain winning the world cup. Iniesta didn't have the best of seasons, but an awesome world cup. I have no doubt that if xavi was the scorer in the final, he'd have won this in a landslide. In the end, it went to the the player who deserved it as well so I have no problems with that. Milito should have had some recognition. He basically was mj for inter with all the important goals he scored.

Rio will get taught a lesson when man utd run into barca this season.

Reid was actually great. We actually played some good football with him, probably the best football we've played since the good days of Peter Withe, but Robson's been totally shit. He looks like he can't be arsed, his analysis of our play is beyond pathetic, he sticks with the same shit players in the same positions and none of our players have progressed under him. We've gone back about 5 years under Robson; total shite. Reid was surprisingly good. A lot of our youngsters stepped up under him, some of the older players were replaced and our play became much, much better. We suffered some shit luck under him, fluffed so many chances in so many important matches that ended up costing us wins and qualifications for tournaments, but the future looked bright under Reid. This is going to sound ridiculous, but we deserved to win and qualify for the second round of the Asian cup 4 years ago when we lost 4-0 to Australia at home. We really deserved to win that match. It would have been our first foray into the second round for nearly 40 years. I still don't know how they scored 4 and we scored none, but we deserved to win that match I wanted Reid to stay, but he wanted to go back to England so you can't really do anything about that. Robson will get fired very soon. We lost to fucking Singapore in our attempt to qualify for the Asian Cup, and in the ASEAN Championship, we got 2 points from 9 and got knocked out in the first round. It's the first time ever that we didn't win a match at the tournament - a tournament that we've won 3 out of the 8 times it's been played and been runner up twice after that. It's pretty much a tournament we've owned for god knows how long but Robson somehow managed us out of the first round without winning. Under Reid we scored a goal which was incorrectly ruled out for offside in the first leg of the final then lost a last minute goal after dominating the whole match in Vietnam so we ended up as runner up.

I can't believe we failed to even come close to qualifying for this shit. The Koreans are the favourites, but the Iraqis have a decent team and you can never count out Saudi Arabia.

He's a bit slow for my liking. We have enough unathletic midfielders in our squad.

We'll be safe by the end of March so we can ease him back into things slowly.

Indeed. That was an r-rated slap.

3 points, baby!

Best

Assuming that Ranger's not coming on because of his attitude in training (from Pardew's comments a week or so ago)

Tiote is a god.

We're dropping deeper and deeper here...

We should be up by at least 2. Gonna be a heartbreaker if we don't win this.

That would have been a genius goal.

FUCK! Shoot, ffs

That goal was a lot of Barton, imo.

SHOLA!!!

That was such a shit miss. How do you not hit the target from 1 yard out?

Not confident in Taylor's ability to not fuck up.

Yeah, they're a top 5 of all time team imo. Probably best ever if we exclude international teams.

Kid Ic is a Barca fanboy I'm one as well