I find it comical how every time Messi and Haaland are mentioned in a sentence, all the Messi fans (the toxic ones) go and discredit Haalands phenomenal season and talk about how he’s just a striker so his goals are just normal. I genuinely don’t know what a player has to do in order to beat Messi because he could do the bare minimum and win it. Haaland did everything this year. He won everything there is to win and contributed to every game he played yet people still want to crown Messi as the 2023 PotY which I think is delusional. Messi is the greatest, but this was not his YEAR. One good month in a year with 11 other bad ones does not equal 12 months of solid high performance and consistency from Haaland. He has done everything he possibly could to win it, meanwhile Messi had one piece of the puzzle. It’s utterly unfair that haaland cannot compete on an international level with Norway and therefore cannot ever be considered the greatest player of the year. People are pretending like Messi did something insane this year, he didn’t. He had a good month. If this was any other player you lot would be fuming.

Anyways that’s my opinion, in the end it’s not like either of them loses sleep over it.

I’m not expecting serious discussions. I’ll probably be called a fanboy or get told to cope a few times but that’s what you get in this community. This is just from a casual fan perspective so if I’m wrong, let me know politely without insults thanks.