The Best Fifa Football Awards 2020: Does Lionel Messi deserve to retain his Best Men’s Player crown?
The Best Fifa Football Awards 2020 take place this week to honour the top performers of last season.
Lionel Messi will be hoping to retain his Best Fifa Men’s Player title in the face of competition from his perennial rival Cristiano Ronaldo and Robert Lewandowski.
So who really was the best in 2019-20?
Using quantitative analysis methods rooted in investment banking, number crunchers at Carteret Analytics believe they can provide an objective answer.
The company mines data to measure a players’ contribution to their team winning matches. It then assigns each player a value called their Carteret Rating.
Who should be named top man at Best Fifa Football Awards?
On that basis, Lionel Messi was again the top player in world football last season and deserves to be named Best Fifa Men’s Player.
But Messi was only marginally more effective than Lewandowski, whose goals helped Bayern Munich win the Champions League.
Ronaldo, meanwhile, does not make it into the top 10 Carteret Ratings, calling into question his place on the three-man shortlist at The Best Fifa Football Awards.
Manchester City’s Kevin de Bruyne was the third best performer in 2019-20, according to the ratings.
Tottenham and England captain Harry Kane was fourth, followed by prolific Borussia Dortmund youngster Erling Braut Haaland.
Messi, Lewandowski and Ronaldo all score highly for the Game Changer element of their rating, which measures influence on a match’s outcome.
But the Barcelona forward has a higher Game Control rating, which reflects factors such as effectiveness in retaining possession.
Analysis of the top seven players according to Carteret Rating and their relative performance in the previous season shows who is on the rise or slide.
While still the best, Messi slipped slightly, as did De Bruyne. But Lewandowski, at 32, improved, as did Kane and Haaland.
