Terry Finisterre
Portugal football captain Cristiano Ronaldo copped the biggest prize in the global sport this week. Well, not really, but on Tuesday he picked up his second consecutive Ballon d’Or trophy as World Footballer of the Year.
The Real Madrid forward beat Argentina’s and Barcelona’s Lionel Messi and Germany’s and Bayern Munich’s Manuel Neuer for his third World Footballer of the Year gong. Interestingly, the Portuguese star captured over 37% of the votes cast by 181 national team coaches, 182 national captains and 181 media representatives from around the world, with his two main rivals getting just about 15% each.
But with voting very much an open business, the votes from Saint Lucia have caused raised eyebrows around the world. Sheldon Emmanuel, the men’s national team captain, Francis ‘Baba’ Lastic, the national coach, and Lawrence James, a writer for the Mirror newspaper, all voted for Germany’s and Bayern Munich’s midfielder Mario Götze. Their three votes were 60% of Götze’s total votes. That’s right. Mario Götze had five votes. And three were from Saint Lucia. This caused plenty of comment on social media, but also in the traditional media and from no less than the BBC, ESPNFC and the Guardian.
The Saint Lucia voters were not the only ones mocked. England manager Roy Hodgson voted for Argentina midfielder Javier Mascherano and, according to Iain Macintosh of ESPNFC, “swiftly became the laughing stock of the world.”
But Macintosh would go on to point out that Mascherano is actually an excellent player.
“At least Hodgson recognised wider issues in player performance,” said the writer. “It was a clear improvement on the St. Lucia manager who voted for Mario Gotze, presumably on the basis that the only game he watched was the World Cup final.”
The BBC also pointed out the odd coincidence in their story on Hodgson’s vote.Goal.com, Focus Online, The Daily Mail, even Islandwide News go in on the act. Even the Bayern Munich fan blog derided the notion that their very own Mario Götze could be considered the best player in the world. To be fair, he did score the winning goal in last year’s World Cup final, but it was only one of two goals for the talented 22-year-old, and he had no assists whilst averaging fewer than 45 minutes per game for the World Cup winners. So what was super about Mario for the Saint Lucian voters?
I reached out to all three men via SMS, email and Facebook. Admittedly, I did not give them a whole lot of time to respond, though Lawrence did get back to me to say he would explain the next day. But I had already been beaten to it. Simon Burnton, writing for his “Fiver” column in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, got in touch with Lawrence and Baba.
“You see, um, we follow international sport very much in Saint Lucia,” James is quoted as saying. “I think he’s one of the favourite athletes locally. It wasn’t that I don’t like [Ronaldo], I just follow the other footballers, who are more popular.”
James also said that he never discussed the voting process with Baba or Sheldon. In fact, he supposedly said that he “never knew there were other people from Saint Lucia who voted.” The plot thickened when the Guardian writer went on to quote the national coach as saying that he was not actually the one who cast his vote. “It’s a long story. You need to speak to the Football Association office. It wasn’t actually me that voted. It was done at the FA, not by me.” So, there’s that, then.
To be fair, the Ballon d’Or, as the ESPNFC column pointed out, is just a silly popularity contest. It shouldn’t really mean anything in a game that is pretty quantifiable and only championships really matter. But this year’s vote certainly meant something for Saint Lucia – a little bit of unexpected notoriety.