- 1 hour ago
After one of the best season's of his Liverpool career, and being Europe's most prolific goal threat, Mo Salah could only manage a 4th place finish in the 2025 Ballon d'Or. But was Ousmane Dembélé really a more deserving winner, or has the Egyptian been robbed. Adam Clery looks at all the data, their respective seasons, and the history of the competition to find out.
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00:00Right, hello there everybody, welcome to the Adam Cleary Football Channel, and I did promise myself
00:04I wasn't going to do any more Liverpool videos for a while, you got enough over the summer,
00:09but it is Carabao Cup third round weekend, none of the fixtures have the blood flowing south,
00:14and producer Archie is on holiday, so I'm going to do something I never normally do, right,
00:20and I'm going to get into the narrative, and that is, my friends, the Ballon d'Or.
00:28A few years ago, the only people who cared about it were the sort of weirdos who were running Messi
00:32or Ronaldo Facebook fan pages,
00:34but now, since their era of dominance seems to be ending, it has become a thing.
00:40People now seem to really care about who wins it, and more to the point, have very strong feelings about
00:46people who don't,
00:47and this year, the primary outcry of injustice surrounds one Mo Salah,
00:54who has never won it, and arguably never had a better case to win it than this year.
00:59So, as someone who prides himself as being very sane when he's on the internet,
01:05I'm going to get into the numbers and the data, and we're going to look at whether or not we
01:09have witnessed a robbery here,
01:11and just to forewarn you, the video I thought I was making when I started this is not the video
01:18I've ended up making.
01:19I learned things on the journey that completely changed my mind.
01:27Now, first off, and you're going to get sick of me telling you this,
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02:00Shutting up now.
02:01Anyway, to business, and this year, after all the votes were tallied, this was your Ballon d'Or top 5.
02:07But in reality, it's actually a top 30.
02:10Van Dijk got some votes, so did Declan Rice, Cole Palmer came 8th, which I was really surprised about,
02:15because the true injustice on this list is that Diego Maradomene did not break the top 10.
02:23Now, I'm just going to have to get over that, despite how it makes me feel,
02:26but for the purposes of this video, this is Salah in relation to Dembele, and it wasn't particularly close.
02:33And we're going to have a big, big look at what they both did on the pitch and dive into
02:37all the numbers,
02:37because that's where the story truly starts to unravel.
02:41But before we do that, I'm going to explain a little bit about how the Ballon d'Or actually works,
02:45because I think that's getting slightly missed in all this.
02:48The Keep, the French football magazine, dream up a list of the 30 best players in the world,
02:53and then the top 100 ranked FIFA nations all submit one journalist to vote on it.
03:00So, like France, England, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Germany, Spain,
03:04all of these major nations have the same voting power as nations like Kosovo, Haiti, El Salvador.
03:11That keeps it democratic, and all of these journalists pick their top 10 out of those 30.
03:17Points are then awarded for their 10th picks.
03:19You get like 15 if you're 1st, and like 1 if you're 10th,
03:22and they top all of that up, and it gives you the final ranking.
03:26Last year, Rodri won with 1,170, only 41 points ahead of Vinicius Jr.,
03:32so it was tighter than Martin Keown's jeans.
03:36Now this year, at the time of me recording this, we don't currently know the points,
03:39but as we're here to discuss Mo Salah in relation to Dembele,
03:42and he was 4th, you can assume it's not even close.
03:47Now what's important, though, is that the criteria that these 100 journalists are supposed to vote on
03:52are as follows.
03:54Individual performances, displaying decisive and impressive character,
03:58which in reality means, did you specifically directly go and impact the really big games?
04:04Team performances and achievements, basically, like, get your medals on the table,
04:09what did you win that season?
04:11And class and fair play, basically, like, are you a fitting beneficiary
04:16to get the honour of being called the best player in the world?
04:20And that, by the way, is why I think Laminya Malz not won it this year,
04:25because you cannot be spending your summer just on yachts,
04:29getting polished off by lasses from OnlyFans,
04:32and then just expect them to still award you the big one at the end of it.
04:37You are not allowed to have that much fun.
04:41But anyway, Mo Salah, so largely discounting the Ronaldo-Messi era,
04:45because they were just so far above every other player at the time,
04:48it largely made a just total mockery of this whole thing.
04:51What do those three criteria actually look like in real life?
04:55Well, if you just go back through years, there is a bit of a pattern that emerges.
05:01Rodri in 2024, he'd won the Euros, Messi in 2023, he'd won the World Cup,
05:06Benzema 2022, the Champions League, Modric 2018, the Champions League,
05:11we're going to ignore just all this bit, Kaka 2007,
05:16the Champions League, Cannavaro in 2006, he'd won the World Cup.
05:20Do you see now? Do you see what it is they want?
05:23Your absolute best shout of winning the Ballon d'Or is by being a player who is instrumental
05:29in a team winning a major continental tournament.
05:34So just, like, open and showcase them.
05:36With no international tournament this summer,
05:38it was always going to be a player who was playing for the team that won the Champions League.
05:44And shock, if we look at that original list of 30,
05:48nine of that PSG team are in there.
05:51Like, they're nearly one-third of the entire field here.
05:55And I would argue very strongly that despite how good the team is,
05:58Kvartiskelia, Hakimi, Mendes, Vettinia,
06:01the player who played the biggest role in all that,
06:04who best symbolises what they've become, was Dembele.
06:07And he decided the most big matches as well.
06:09So, fair play.
06:11But the thing is, right, that's not what it's supposed to be about, is it?
06:16It's supposed to be about who has been the best player in the world over the last 12 months.
06:23And is that not just Mo Salah, irrespective of what Liverpool may or may not have won?
06:30Well, let's discuss that.
06:32Now, obviously, we don't have one singular way to measure the best player in the world.
06:37But what we do have, thankfully, are like 5 million different data points with which we can compare them all.
06:43And these are their FB ref numbers across all the major categories for an attacker.
06:48So, you've got goals, you've got assists, but you've also got chance creation and overall play.
06:54So, their general involvement in games.
06:56And these defensive numbers just represent...
06:59What's the word I want here?
07:02Graft.
07:03Working hard.
07:03Getting stuck in.
07:04They're both on the exact same standards for comparison.
07:07So, it's all competitions over the last 365 days.
07:10And it's pretty easy to see, I think, that Dembele has had the better season.
07:17All of these 99s here mean that Dembele is literally the number one ranking player across Europe for that stat.
07:25So, goals for shots.
07:27All the ex-stuff that your dad hates.
07:29Even ball carries.
07:31And he's miles ahead of Salah in terms of his passing, his carrying and beating players.
07:36I just put one second there, buddy.
07:39All right, don't turn the video off.
07:40In the interest of holding your attention, I'm going to tell you right now, there's a twist coming.
07:45Right?
07:46A really big one.
07:47You're going to think you know which direction I'm going here and that I'm being really boring about it.
07:51And then, BAM!
07:52I'm going to hit you with a bus from the other side of the street.
07:54Okay?
07:55Just stick with me.
07:56So, anyway, back in the room.
07:58Even the defensive stuff here that looks pretty even, if we expand it out, it's night and day.
08:04Dembele's had a really important role in terms of how PSG press and function as a system.
08:09And Salah is largely relieved of those duties by younger, more athletic players in the Liverpool XI.
08:16So, he can focus on doing what he does best.
08:19So, yeah, really straightforward, right?
08:21Dembele's better.
08:22End of video.
08:23Thanks for watching.
08:23Well, not for me, my friends.
08:26Because as boring as the best league in the world tag is, even if we just take a quick cursory
08:33look at Opta's strength of competition graph from earlier this season,
08:37you'll see that playing the bulk of your games for the top team in this league versus the top team
08:43in this league is a very different proposition.
08:46So, then, if you're going to look at the data to help you make a decision, surely you need to
08:51find a way to address that disparity, right?
08:54So, if we go back to these numbers and we only look at the Champions League games last season, they
09:01actually tell you the exact same thing.
09:04Dembele is still Europe's number one for a number of these metrics.
09:08And while Salah is clearly at the very top of his football, it just doesn't quite hit those same heights
09:14as consistently.
09:15And I've also heard people make the argument, well, if Dembele's so good, why, then, if you top up all
09:21the combined goals and assists across Europe last season,
09:24is Mo Salah still head and shoulders above everyone else and he's all the way down in 10th?
09:33Like, 47 to 27 is a massive difference.
09:36And even without penalties, that would still have Salah on 38, which is still the most across Europe.
09:43But, and we still haven't got to the twist yet, by the way, that's still coming, right?
09:48But, do this again by minutes played.
09:51And they completely swap around.
09:54Dembele had the singular best output across Europe in the last 12 months because he had nearly half the minutes
10:02of Mo Salah in the league.
10:04And even with all the additional Champions League games and the Club World Cup,
10:08he still played 1,000 less minutes than Mo Salah did.
10:13But just, do you know what it is, right?
10:15While that is the single most impressive thing about Dembele's season,
10:21it is also the reason why Salah should have won it.
10:27And that's the twist.
10:28Yes, that's right, the little fucking stats virgin had a look at all the stats and said,
10:33I don't care about any of those.
10:34Give it to the man who is simply the best physical specimen.
10:38All of these numbers are individually great, but they are still a product of the team environment you are in.
10:45Like, genuinely, do you want to see an enormous sliding doors moment with all of this?
10:51PSG put Liverpool out of the Champions League themselves because of this goal from Dembele that is caused by Canate
10:58making a defensive error and him punishing it.
11:02But just a few minutes before that, Mo Salah has Liverpool's best chance of the game.
11:07His movement is great, he gets it on target, but is denied by an unreal block from Nuno Mendes.
11:14And just to put that another way, right, Canate doesn't dive in here and Mendes is a fraction off here
11:21and Liverpool go through.
11:23And not only do they go through, but they've got Villa in the next round, Arsenal after that, and then
11:27Inter in the final.
11:29And you would make them marginal, if not clear, favourites in every single one of those games.
11:35And this is what I mean about why you have to separate the individual performances from what happens as a
11:41team.
11:41Because I think if you look at these numbers side by side, they are both individually good enough to be
11:46considered the best player in the world.
11:49But what does separate them, or for me it does at least, right, is that I think maintaining these numbers
11:54when you start 50 out of your club's 56 games,
11:59including every single league match, right, is a much bigger achievement than someone who does 38 of their club's 65
12:08games.
12:09And just in case you're wondering, like, Dembele wasn't injured last season across Liga and the Champions League, the Coupe
12:15de France.
12:15He only missed three games with injury. He was just very well rotated and very well rested.
12:21And I know I'm going to sound like some guy in their 50s taking their under-9s coaching badges way
12:25too seriously.
12:26But for me, the most impressive ability in modern football is still availability.
12:34Like, Salah might not quite have done what Dembele did purely in terms of numbers,
12:38but to be doing this three times a week, almost every single week of the season, just blows my head
12:44clean off.
12:46Like, of the six games, he didn't start for Liverpool.
12:49He had the first three rounds of the Carabao Cup, the first two rounds of the FA Cup,
12:54and the one dead rubber they had in the Champions League.
12:58So every single time the game was big and they needed a result, he got himself in that starting XI.
13:05And that is... I don't even have the word for it. There isn't a word for it.
13:10I don't think there's another player in the world right now who contributes at such a high level,
13:15so dependably, so consistently, and just so frequently.
13:19So yeah, just robbed, in my opinion.
13:23They're never going to give Big Henry Winter's coveted English media voting spot to me,
13:28but if they did, that's where my 15 points would have gone.
13:33But also, just to potentially undo all the hard work up until this point of the video,
13:38I should also say that I don't think that the Ballon d'Or should matter to you as a football
13:45fan.
13:45I think it should be a massive deal and potentially life-changing for the players, yes,
13:50but for the rest of us, I think it's a major hallmark of how weird the whole thing's got,
13:56how we've become obsessed with these people as personalities rather than athletes.
14:01The whole thing's just gotten so parasocial over the last couple of years,
14:04and by design as well, because agents and the people who manage the players
14:08would much rather you supported them than the clubs they play for,
14:12so they've manufactured it to be this way.
14:14But I digress, it's becoming very, very difficult to have sane discussions about football,
14:20because you inherently have to talk about footballers,
14:23and people are weird about footballers now.
14:26And this big golden orb is sort of like the Oscars of that.
14:31And yeah, you're right, that is a bit of a weird thing to say after the last 15 minutes,
14:36but the point I'm trying to make is that Mo Salah can rightly feel a sense of injustice.
14:41You should be disappointed and sad and maybe even a little angry,
14:44because he deserved to win this, in my opinion.
14:47But you should not really feel any of those things.
14:51You should, what should you do?
14:53You should call your mother or go make some time for that thing you like and haven't done in ages.
14:58And as for me, well, I have to edit this video now, so I'm going to go and do that.
15:02But of course, by the time you watch it, it will already have happened.
15:04That's weird.
15:05Anyway, please do subscribe to us here at ACFC.
15:08And of course, you can follow me across all the social medias at Adam Cleary, C-L-E-R-Y.
15:12Quick last plug for the channel memberships.
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15:28That is the plan, and you get the little badges, the emojis,
15:30all the stuff that YouTube makes you throw in.
15:32I'm actually dead excited about it, and we've got quite a few people already,
15:35so it would be really cool if you personally came and joined.
15:39But until next time, though, I know I've just said, like, don't really feel things,
15:43but obviously feel things.
15:44That's what life's all about.
15:45And let me know what those are in the comments down below.
15:48Do you think this matters to Mo Salah?
15:50Do you think if he retires tomorrow, he'll consider his legacy not fulfilled
15:54because he should have won the big, shiny gold thing?
15:57Yes or no?
15:58Down below, please do let me know.
16:00And until next time, I'll see you really soon.
16:04I wanted to throw in a joke about the Eketike shirt thing,
16:07but I couldn't make it fit.
16:09But that was funny, wasn't it?
16:11Goodbye.
16:11Bye.
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