There are not many certainties in football these days except, maybe the one that says whenever Fifa president Sepp Blatter pulls his hand out of his pocket it will contain the wrong envelope.
When he did it again this week while producing the name of Lionel Messi there was, at least in some quarters, more surprise than outrage, not least because the latter commodity was surely exhausted last month when Blatter announced Russia and Qatar as hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Those decisions didn't only break the rules, they violated decency, a fact which no doubt softened the reaction to Messi's second successive World Player of the Year award. It also helped that he is a player of the ages, wonderfully skilled, insanely creative and of impeccable decorum.
However, if a rule wasn't broken, an extremely sound precedent was when he came home ahead of Andres Iniesta and Xavi Hernandez.
This was because, ever since Fifa set up the award in 1991, one preference until this week was always apparent. It was that in a World Cup year the great prize had to go to the man who had done most to shape the outcome of football's greatest tournament.
According to this principle some winners pre-1991 would have been absolute no-brainers: Pele in 1970, Franz Beckenbauer – 1974, Mario Kempes – 1978, Paolo Rossi – 1982, Diego Maradona in 1986. In 1990 the tournament was so bad it would have been best to have drawn a veil over the whole turgid misadventure.
That dilemma, however, has not returned, despite some tournaments of dubious quality, and the player of the year has been the World Cup's most valuable performer. Brazil's folk hero Romario won it 1994, Zinedine Zidane in 1998, Ronaldo in 2002 and Fabio Cannavaro took the prize in 2006.
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