Everyone crying about the ballon dor being rigged, please read this. Because the real reason he won is because the ballon dor is a subjective award. In your mind, haaland, mbappe, rodri or kdb may have been the best. But in the mind of the 100 journalists (or at least most of them) it was messi. Again, it is a SUBJECTIVE award. You can certainly disagree with the outcome, but it cannot be rigged because the criteria for the award is SUBJECTIVE. And there is no real standard for what makes a ballon dor winner other than who impresses the journalists more. This year, that was messi. It also was messi in 2009,2010,2011,2012,2015,2019, and 2021. You can disagree, thats fine. But it is not rigged, because it is SUBJECTIVE. You also must realize this is an award from a newspaper, so it is not perfect. You have biases for your favorite clubs, and the journalists have biases for their favorite players as well. Maybe if you took 100 random people who had no football knowledge and asked them to vote, haaland would have won. But that wouldnt be perfect either, as these people would never appreciate the ways teams create goals, just the goals themselves. Maybe if you took 100 fans then. Well, maybe you accidentally got too many serie a fans, and not oshimen is lifting the award. No democracy is perfect, and its ok to disagree with the result. But get out of here with this “rigged” bs. Besides, if france football really loved him so much, they could find an excuse to give it to him every year from 2007 to 2019.