Barcelona v Bayern Munich – click here to read preview
Barcelona’s Argentina forward Lionel Messi is already the best player in the world, according to his club president Joan Laporta.
Laporta claimed his Barcelona star will win the Ballon d’Or as soon as his team wins something.
“It depends on the results of the team,” he told the Gazzetta dello Sport. “But Messi is definitely already the best player in the world because he’s a genius.
“Players like him only come around once every 30 years.”
Last year Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo finished top in both the World Player of the Year and Ballon d’Or polls and the year before it was ACMilan’s Kaka – in both cases their team had won the Champions League while the year before that it was Italy’s World Cup-winning captain Fabio Cannavaro who scooped the top awards.
It is not only Messi who has supposedly been overlooked because of his team’s failure to win things: in Italy many think Inter’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic would figure more prominently if his team did better in Europe.
Ibrahimovic is a reported transfer target for Barcelona this summer and Laporta did nothing to dispell those rumours.
“I’m not going to talk about that out of respect for (Inter president Massimo) Moratti,” he said.
Barcelona v Bayern Munich – click here to read preview
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