Cristiano Ronaldo's FIFA Ballon D'Or Profile Is Unacceptable

A few news websites are making the obvious observation this morning. Cristiano Ronaldo's achievements in this calendar year are played down in his FIFA profile for the ballon d'or while praise for other contenders are not limited to their profiles and instead appear in his. And that's not the only reason to be dissatisfied with his quite unacceptable write-up.

For example, Lionel Messi's 2012-13 league season goal-haul is very precisely highlighted in Ronaldo's write-up rather than in his own, while Ronaldo's own tally in Europe in 2013 is vaguely described as a "hatful" of goals. This is especially interesting since FIFA is not supposed to take notice of goals scored by Messi in 2012 anyway - only those scored in 2013. And even so, why isn't that achievement, even if it is irrelevant, noted in Messi's own write-up?

The descriptions make for dire side-by-side reading, for the record. Here is Ronaldo's in full -

Cristiano Ronaldo: 2013 proved to be another goal-drenched year for Cristiano Ronaldo. The Portuguese star helped himself to 34 of them in the 2012/13 Liga season, a haul beaten only by Lionel Messi's 45, and scored a hatful more in Europe and for his national team. Always on top form for Real Madrid and Portugal, the flying forward, who won the FIFA World Player award in 2008, is only gaining in stature with Los Merengues, and it came as no surprise when he extended his contract with the club to 2018 and said he was considering staying put for the rest of his career.

Cristiano Ronaldo, it must be said, is not a player one finds hard to praise. And yet his write-up is three sentences long. One is vague (what is a goal-drenched year, precisely?). The second includes praise for a competitor. The third is fluff or filler noting his contract extension and his intention to remain at Real Madrid - nice to know, but not really relevant in a description of his peculiar talents. There is none of the extravagant praise reserved for other players. When compared with his chief competitors for the award, Ronaldo's write-up is quite innocent of adjectives.

Full profiles can be found at the link so that readers can draw their own conclusions.

For the record, were I writing his write-up, I would have been slightly more precise. Rather than noting a goal-haul accumulated largely in 2012 by another player, I would have noted that his "goal-drenched" (a vague descriptor, isn't it?) year means 62 goals so far - 17 more goals than any other player - with 6 weeks to go.

Ronaldo's "hatful" of goals in Europe in 2013 is of course 14 goals. Perhaps the writer responsible was dashing out for his lunch-break and couldn't be bothered to look up the number.

Coming after Sepp Blatter's unacceptable comments about Cristiano Ronaldo at the Oxford Union, it all seems to have been very poorly managed.

Community Members: how would you write up Ronaldo?