The Best FIFA Award ceremony took place last night and several individuals associated with FC Barcelona currently or in the past were honoured for their achievements on the night.
Pep Guardiola, the legendary Barcelona coach, won the award of The Best FIFA Men’s Coach, while another former player, Lionel Messi, won The Best FIFA Men’s Player award. Aitana Bonmati, the Barcelona Femeni midfielder, won The Best FIFA Women’s Player award.
As already reported here, Xavi also ranked high in the coaches ranking, as he finished fourth with the same number of votes, eleven, as Simeone Inzaghi, but the Italian was ranked third because of more first-choice votes.
In such ceremonies, it is always interesting to see the way in which high-profile names vote for the various candidates. Thus, Barcelona fans would be interested to know how one of their biggest legends, Lionel Messi, voted for the award of the best manager.
SPORT has provided the answer to this question, as the publication reports that Messi chose Xavi as the second-best coach, and gave his first vote to Pep Guardiola.
Messi has a close association with both these individuals as he played with Xavi during his time at Barcelona, and Pep Guardiola was the coach of the Catalan club with both Xavi and Messi as his players.
Other notable names also picked Xavi as one of the best coaches for the last year. Mbappe gave Xavi the third position, while Alvaro Morata, Virgil Van Dijk, Heung-min Son, and Bernardo Silva also voted for Xavi.
Despite the team’s victorious La Liga campaign last year, none of the Barcelona players made it into the FIFPro Men’s World XI, which was dominated by six Manchester City players. Real Madrid also had three players in this list, while Messi and Mbappe completed the eleven.
