If it wasn't Rodri but Vinicius Junior or someone else who was honored, they would say the same thing. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have said it many times. It's not too much, and it's completely true because football is a team game. Messi and Ronaldo have had many successful seasons, scoring a lot of goals, but they also need teammates to protect their achievements and support them in scoring.
However, controversy is inevitable when views and perspectives are different, not to mention the "anti" and heavy criticism... Remember, even individual sports like tennis, where people face each other on the other side of the net, are full of controversy, so how can you avoid that in football?
One needs to understand more about the context and the aggregate details that make up an individual victory. Vinicius won the Champions League but Brazil failed in the Copa America. Meanwhile, Rodri - in addition to his trophies at Manchester City, he also won EURO 2024 with Spain, a tournament where the defensive midfielder was named the best player.
It should be noted that Rodri is a defensive midfielder, to see how influential he is in the team. It is similar to how Luka Modric won the Golden Ball in 2018 when he made his mark for the Croatian team at the World Cup (reaching the final), on the basis of success with Real Madrid. People compared Modric to Ronaldo that year, when the Portuguese star scored 65 goals in 75 matches, but clearly, he did not have the plus points in the World Cup, when Portugal was eliminated in the round of 16.
Vinicius and Real Madrid created some crazy moments in the Champions League, but it is not too much to say that Rodri and Man City or the Spanish national team left a mark of stability, surpassing the collective factor in the "points-counting" period (from August 2023 to July 2024).
Real Madrid “did not understand” the criteria for the vote, but as in many previous controversies, many other races, some things can change in a short time, where candidates lose points for their attitude, not their qualifications. So the honored individual is only a representative of the collective, where each person has a task and is equally excellent…
