Opinion: FIFA Best Eleven winners leak suggests complete farce as players clearly picked on reputations not performances

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We all know there’s nothing FIFA love more than an excuse to get together for a giant free lunch and try to slap themselves on the back as often as possible. 

The latest excuse for an awards ceremony comes in the shape of The Best Fifa Football Awards to be held in Milan this evening. It’s a grand chance for FIFA executives to help themselves feel very important and hand out some fairly meaningless prizes.

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The biggest farce may the be “Ideal Eleven” where there’s a high chance they asked some kid who spends all their time playing Ultimate Team and thinking only four teams in the world exist to pick a team. The winners were leaked by Marca and it suggests the selection committee don’t actually watch a lot of football.

Leaked FIFA ideal XI

As you can see, don’t even bother trying to get into this team unless you’ve featured in the latter stages of the Champions League or been heavily linked with Real Madrid at some point.

For reference let’s have a look at Real Madrid and how they fared last season. Finished third in the league and humiliated in the Champions League by Ajax? Better get three of those players in please. Eden Hazard was good last season but better than everyone in the Man City midfield? Obviously that Summer move and awful start to his Real Madrid career has clinched that space for him.

Marcelo showed obvious signs of his form dropping and could only play 23 La Liga games last season, yet finds himself in here yet again.

Still the “ideal” left back apparently

It just further proves that FIFA would be delighted to turn football into a mini league featuring only Barcelona, Real Madrid, PSG, Juventus and maybe Bayern Munich.

They will be furious that Ajax came so close to ruining the established order last year, expect some condescending pats on the head for the two former Ajax players in the squad before congratulating them for joining a “real” team this year.

In the grand scheme of Fifa’s corruption and proving they aren’t fit for purpose, this probably ranks fairly low on the list, but it still proves what a massive farce the whole thing is.

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