Ballon d'Or: Why ranking Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo is a temptation we should ignore

The insistence on ranking the world's best risks devaluing our appreciation

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This is not an awards ceremony for the nostalgic. Few events in the footballing calendar symbolise the modern game’s split from the good old days – the rain-soaked terraces, the tracksuit managers spitting teeth at strikers too overweight to give a toss – than the FIFA Ballon D’Or Awards. It’s a glittery, golden vomit of red carpets and selfies and diamond encrusted Tuxedos, as self-congratulatory as the Oscars and equally oblivious to what it symbolises; a sickly, creepy celebration of wealth held amidst an on-going corruption investigation defined by greed and power and death. Football has never been judged on calendar years and the anachronism here only heightens the sense of a jarring, clumsily decadent affair designed for, well… not for us, anyway.

But the most intriguing aspect of this awards ceremony (and of all award rituals) is the need to establish hierarchy, to conclude definitely – statistically, officially – a rank order of talent. The desire to define by binary lists is natural enough, but it is rarely helpful. Awards ceremonies are, essentially, a short-hand way of articulating appreciation; to rank by order is significantly easier than accepting multiplicity or eloquently describing in words why two things can be beautiful in different ways. How many of us, when emerging from a cinema, struggle to do justice verbally to what we have seen and instead simply tell a friend what it is better than, or what it is worse than?

Of course by doing this we risk narrowing our scope for appreciation, something pertinent when discussing the endlessly revolving rivalry at the top of world football. Messi or Ronaldo: which one is better? Which one deserves it more? Which one do you prefer? For me, such pinpoint categorisations risk a human inclination to (as Wordsworth said of those analysing nature’s beauty too closely) “murder to dissect”. Because the truth is, Messi and Ronaldo do not operate in rivalry but in symbiosis, their stark contradictions in style accentuating the idiosyncrasies of each. Why bother ranking them one and two, as if one need be seen as better than the other?

Messi v Ronaldo analysis is forever clogged with reams of statistical data, and though the numbers are bewildering – and thus helpful – they miss something crucial. The media's obsession with quantitative deduction overlooks the abstractness, the magic, of two superstars whose very interpretation of the art – Ronaldo, the razor-edge machine of rationale, and Messi, the aesthetic magician of chaos – is framed in classically diametric opposites. It is the Apollonian versus the Dionysian, a contradiction that exists in perfect balance; in harmony, and not in conflict. So complete is their difference that they often appear as two super-humans designed by the gods to test the two poles of art: power versus patterns, speed versus guile, logic versus chaos.

Ronaldo is a machine. His radical transformation from tempestuous, flailing whizz-kid at Man United to the immaculately sculpted, futuristic CR7 robot of 2016 is an astonishing victory for dedication and emphatic self-belief; sport is so intoxicating because it champions humanity’s uniquely beautiful characteristics, and in Ronaldo it is mentality that we chiefly celebrate.

Well, that and the brute power of his linear interpretation of the game. This is a man who arrived on the scene with that bleach-blonde flop of hair looking for all the world like he’d fallen out of a 12-year-olds FIFA game, but who now looks like a super-computer with access to the cheat codes, able to exploit the glitches with algorithmic consistency. Get ball. Run with ball. Score goal. Repeat. He is well above the minutiae of tiki-taka interplay, almost mocking the complexity of our sport.

What we adore about Leo Messi is the polar opposite: he is imaginativec creativie, ina way that the scoffing and huffing Ronaldo simply cannot muster. Messi shimmers as he glides, conjuring angles and moulding events with the terrifying telepathy of something seriously alien. Things just swirl around him. In 2015 his achievements did surmount those of his rival, whom he helped defeat to the league title and Spanish Cup. Ronaldo didn’t lift his team with two goals and an assist in the last quarter of an hour of the Champions League semi-final, nor did he score his 30^th career hat-trick.

But sifting through these finer details can cast a grey shadow over Real’s superstar, dimming his own personal triumphs in the act of comparison. To celebrate that Messi is the best, Messi is king – as FIFA did their best to accentuate on the night – is to ignore that Ronaldo scored 57 goals in 57 games, an achievement that, in the days before their duopoly of this award, seemed impossible in the modern game.

At 31 and 28 years of age, it won’t be long before these two players drift slowly, agonisingly, out of contention for the major gong, and when that happens we will be left with a sudden and peculiar vacuum of super-human talent. It will be a sad day when we finally acknowledge that the Messi/Ronaldo dynasty has crumbled, to be replaced by a new generation of world-class footballers who, however good, will seem disappointingly human. So let’s not get obsessed with who won it this year, or who will win it next; just enjoy them both, together, while it lasts.