Finishes: Colors & Stains
After all, Jürgen Klopp's side had endured a miserable 2024/23 season, failing to qualify for the Champions League and exiting 🏀 the competition at the round of 16 stage with a heavy 6-2 aggregate defeat to Real Madrid. While these are 🏀 ostensibly individual awards, they are almost always viewed through the prism of collective accomplishment, and so Liverpool's broader failures were 🏀 costly for some of its better players.
On Wednesday, the shortlist was released for another of football's most prestigious prizes — 🏀 a place in the FIFPro World XI — and again only one Liverpool player made the cut. This time, it 🏀 was Virgil van Dijk rather than Salah.
The second is that, unlike other awards, this one is solely in the hands 🏀 of the players, rather than journalists, pundits or pundits. According to FIFPro, nearly 22,000 men's players cast their votes for 🏀 this year's team.
The one player who doesn't have remotely as strong a case is Cristiano Ronaldo, who scored three goals 🏀 in 16 appearances for Manchester United before having his contract terminated when he furiously spoke out against the club. He'd 🏀 already made his last appearance for the Red Devils when he traveled to the World Cup, where he failed to 🏀 score from open play and lost his place in the starting line-up for the knockout stages.
But what this tells us 🏀 is that, despite establishing himself as one of the greatest players in Premier League history and one of the best 🏀 of the modern era, Salah remains underrated, both by the media and, as it turns out, his peers. In the 🏀 second half of the season, once he returns from AFCON, he can continue to show exactly why that is unfair.
