Mo Salah 'FLAW' just cost him the Ballon d'Or

Mo Salah finished fourth in the Ballon d’Or rankings on Monday evening. It’s through a ‘flaw’ (it’s not a flaw) in his game that cost him a proper run at the trophy.

The Ballon d'Or has gotten a bit out of hand. A trophy that was once a nice little extra in a year is now treated on par with major trophies.

Perhaps the maddest part of it all is how people pay any attention to rankings outside the top five. The way the award is voted for creates a strange distribution.

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It's all essentially random beyond that point - no, Virgil van Dijk is not the 28th best player in the world. Perhaps every journalist can view him as their 11th-best player - that would see him get zero votes. Then it just takes one or two journalists to vote for someone as their no.1 and they’ll fire up the list, even if they were rock bottom for everyone else.

The real problem, though, is that Mo Salah wasn't really in the running to win the Ballon d'Or on Monday. He actually did finish fourth, behind Ousemane Dembélé, Lamine Yamal and Vitinha.

And that's wrong, quite honestly.

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Mo Salah's flaw

Maybe Salah should have won it, maybe he shouldn't have. Dembélé is unquestionably a solid winner as he not only scored plenty of goals for Paris Saint-Germain in a trophy-laden season but he also provided key moments in massive fixtures.

A goal at Anfield that proved decisive, assists in both legs against Aston Villa, a goal in a 1-0 win at Arsenal and an assist in the home leg. Then came two assists in the final.

Dembélé deserved to be firmly in the running and probably deserved to win it. Everyone can argue for their favourite but no one can really deny that the Frenchman was a worthy winner.

What can be argued against is that Salah wasn't mentioned as a potential winner for much of this race. Instead, the focus fell on whether Lamine Yamal would pip Dembélé to the post.

And that is ridiculous. Again, that's not to criticise Yamal, though you'd be hard pressed to find a single way in which he was superior to Salah last season.

The point is that the dialogue, the momentum and, in the end, the votes were never with Salah. That is absolutely bizarre for someone who was both the top scorer and top creator in the Premier League last season as his team won it and he set a record for the most goal contributions in a 38-game season.

Of course, the was a narrative around Salah winning it. It happened last December as he was so far and away the best player in the world that no one could really argue against him.

Pre-December, Salah had scored 14 times and assisted another 10. Liverpool topped both the Premier League and the UEFA Champions League league phase. For comparison, Dembélé had five goals and five assists at that stage. Yamal had seven and nine.

This was essentially the peak of Salah's season. He was brilliant for the rest of it but, as is usually the case, his first-half was better than his second.

It's something that costs him massively and is a 'flaw' when it comes to awards like this. Recency bias is very, very real and performing well over the second half of a season will typically benefit you when it comes to voting.

Salah's efforts just didn't have the same impact when it came to scoring a player's season. And that's despite, in terms of the league, having a strong first-half of the campaign being far more valuable.

Liverpool won the title at a canter because of their dominance over the first half. Arsenal, their only rivals, essentially switched their focus elsewhere once it became clear they couldn't catch the Reds.

Not to mention the confidence that starting a season strong can bring. We saw it in the 2019/20 title win and then again last season.

That was down to Mo Salah and his ridiculous form up until around February. In the end, that form didn't carry as much weight into the Ballon d'Or as it would have if he'd had his season the other way around.

But then do Liverpool win the title? Does a squad trying to gel under a new head coach pick up the same points in that first half if not for Salah's brilliance? Almost certainly not - the fact he started strong is what won the title.

That doesn't lend itself to the Ballon d'Or, though. And that's why Salah was an 'also ran' in the end - when he arguably should have been winning it.

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