How fans evaluate players is fundamentally flawed

During CBS Sports’ pre-match show of this season’s Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool, a question was asked to the pundits: “Should this match decide the Ballon d’Or between [Sadio] Mane and [Karim] Benzema.”

I understand that trophies often have a large role to play in deciding the best player in the world each season, but I strongly believe that it should not be the case.

The way that we evaluate players is fundamentally flawed

Fans and pundits alike need to evolve their way of comparing and evaluating players.

A great example of this is less than a year ago when Manchester United and Arsenal both bought central defenders. Ben White and Raphael Varane are two players at very different stages of their careers and because of that are seen with very different pedigrees. Arsenal were slandered for spending more money on a player who was perceived to be worse based on reputation and accomplishments, which may seem fair.

In reality, though, Madrid were willing to move on from an ageing centre back on high wages (although Varane, too, wanted to move on), while, on the contrary, Brighton did not need to sell a young English player. After all of that, I believe that many would say that White had a better season than Varane despite the pedigree that the Frenchman has by winning Champions Leagues and La Liga titles.

In last season’s Ballon d’Or, Chelsea’s Jorginho placed third in the voting purely because he was a part of two different trophy-winning sides. His placing didn’t come from him being the third-best player in the world in 2021, but from being on two of the best teams. In that same conversation, Mason Mount or Ben Chilwell could have been in the same position if England had prevailed in the final, and nobody last season would have argued that either was the third-best player in the world.

There are 11 players on a football pitch, winning a trophy in the league or a knockout tournament is a momentous achievement and there are very rarely times that this achievement can be accredited to just one of the many players in the squad.

Now is where I talk about… Harry Kane *ducks*. This is an Arsenal site and I know this is a blasphemous thing to say, but Harry Kane is one of the best Premier League strikers ever *ducks again*. It is very easy to write off Kane’s success with the fact that the England captain is yet to win a trophy not called the Audi Cup. But even then, he still stands above as one of the best strikers England has seen. Trophies and team success can cloud objective judgement when it comes to evaluating how good a player is. Kane’s legacy at Spurs could be hurt by not winning a trophy if that is how his time there ends (fingers crossed it does!) but it absolutely cannot take away from how good a player he has been since breaking onto the scene at Tottenham.

Meanwhile, Liverpool lost the Champions League final which naturally led to some takes like this tweet here:

This is banter, but it goes to show the main crux of my argument: if team trophies reflected player skill Mustafi wouldn’t have a world cup trophy and Virgil van Dijk most certainly would.

In conclusion, I think we as fans need to do a better job at looking at a complete picture. It is very easy to call Kane a failure for not winning a trophy and Varane world-class right now for having won many. But so much more needs to be considered when evaluating a player being signed by your team or just being compared on Twitter.