Retirement of Franck Ribéry – “A flight”: How the Ballon d’Or 2013 plunged Ribéry – Eurosport FR

Franck Ribéry bears two scars. One, the one that bars his face, escapes no one, a vestige of a car accident when he was only a child. The other is not visible to the naked eye. It dates from 2013 and a vote that he never digested. Franck Ribéry is the man of the year 2013 according to Kicker. He won everything: the Bundesliga, the German Cup and, above all, the Champions League. Everything except the Ballon d’Or. This is his tragedy from which he will never recover. It must be said that this Ballon d’Or seemed destined for him. Franck Ribéry during the presentation of the Ballon d’Or in 2013Credit: Getty ImagesLigue 1Red lantern, worst attack in L1: can Ajaccio still believe it? AT 2 HOURS Designated UEFA player of the year, present in all end-of-season typical teams, the Frenchman embodied above all the hegemony of Bayern Munich. But the votes designated Cristiano Ronaldo who had won nothing that year but scored 55 goals in as many matches. Ribéry, however acclaimed by journalists, even settled for third place behind Lionel Messi. He becomes one of countless victims of the two-headed monster like Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Wesley Sneijder and Manuel Neuer.Cristiano Ronaldo and Pelé – 2013 Ballon d’or award winnersCredit: Getty ImagesThe quest for a lifetimeAll those players who deserved , for posterity, to have their name on the list but who had to give up their arms in the face of the Ronaldo-Messi wave, driven by statistics, marketing, the mode of voting including captains and coaches, and the spirit of the times which favors the giga-stars to those who carry a collective. Michel Platini then sums up the general malaise: “I am disappointed because the Ballon d’Or, for fifty years, took into account the result, the prize list on the ground. There, we is to the overall value of the players, and that is a problem. I am very disappointed for Franck Ribéry. Next year, we will come back, and it will be Messi-Ronaldo, in two years it will be Ronaldo-Messi, in three years this will be Ronaldo-Messi…”Ribéry, a former pariah of training centers to which per sone did not believe in his beginnings, had made the quest for a life like revenge on a dented course. So he cashes but cashes badly. The same evening, when the tide had turned for a few weeks and the curious delay in the votes benefited a Ronaldo, author of a dazzling start to the season, he gave the deception: “Obviously I would have liked to win. But that We Bayern players, starting with me, are just proud to have been here.” But no one is fooled in this month of January. Franck Ribéry with the Champions League trophy won by Bayern Munich in 2013.Credit: Getty Images More than a disappointment, it’s the biggest injustice of my careerThis race for the Ballon d’Or animated him for months and the sanguine Boulonnais, who pushed all his compatriots to support him, was very touchy on the issue until he almost came to blows with Gérard Houllier at the half-time of a France-Australia (6-0). The former coach of the Blues had expressed his preference for Ronaldo, Ribéry had not supported. So, when the sentence fell, Ribéry put on a good face but a part of him collapsed. It will take him years and a lot of hindsight to verbalize what he experienced as the most painful episode of his career. : “More than a disappointment, it’s the biggest injustice of my career, he blurted out in L’Equipe in 2019. Not just for me, for a lot of people. I was above and I finished third. I had nothing to envy in that year to Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi.” “It’s as if it were a theft”, he will still lament on Canal Plus. This year again, last June in the columns of the Gazzetta, he ruminated: “I should have won it. They delayed the allocation of votes, something strange happened. It seemed to me a political decision. “Ribéry never recovered from it. He will also admit that it took him time to recover. But has he really recovered? Because this missed meeting has especially sounded the beginning of the end for Ribéry. He should have consecrated him as the king but made him slide down a dizzying slope. We will never see the Kaiser of 2012/2013 again. At Bayern and especially elsewhere. Franck Ribéry, his different lives in blueCredit: Quentin Guichard This vote also marks a point of fracture with a country, France, with which relations had already deteriorated over all kinds of affairs. “I had the support of some French people but not all of my country, he accused in 2018. I saw with my own eyes, people, French people, coaches say: it’s Cristiano Ronaldo ( the Ballon d’Or). Do you think Portugal would have wanted it to be Messi or Ribéry? Impossible. Do you think Argentina would have wanted Ronaldo or Ribéry to be Ballon d’Or? Impossible.” the Golden Ball. In March, the spearhead of French football played, without knowing it, his last match in Blue. In June, he missed the World Cup in Brazil with a back injury. In August, he retired from international football. Something broke with this Ballon d’Or and his standards will keep dropping. And unlike the one on his face, that scar hasn’t healed yet. 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