Real Madrid: An overlooked argument for Karim Benzema winning Ballon d’Or

Next month, football fans will learn the official winner of the 2021 Ballon d’Or, and the debates regarding the winner could not be more heated. Lionel Messi remains in the conversation, Robert Lewandowski is seen as the mainstream favorite after COVID robbed the record-breaking goal-scorer of the honor in 2020, and Real Madrid‘s very own Karim Benzema is receiving a groundswell of support for his all-around excellence at the striker position.

There are a number of arguments that can be made for any of these three players, and parsing the debate out between Benzema and Lewandowski, in particular, becomes a philosophical one.

In the case of Benzema, there is an additional layer that needs to be explored to his candidacy. I have seen a lot of comments regarding the importance of team success, which is quite interesting given the lack of success achieved by Barcelona in 2021. None of which is Messi’s fault, considering he was holding an absolute train wreck of an organization together by their flimsiest threads.

Yet it is fair to say that Benzema did the same for Real Madrid in the second half of the 2020-2021 season. Real were in the LaLiga title race up until the very end, and they made it to the semifinals of the Champions League, with Benz’s goal against Chelsea standing out as the lone moment of quality in a tie in which Real were roundly embarrassed by the eventual champions.

Karim Benzema saved Real Madrid from tumbling out of the group stages

Benzema was carrying the load for a team that barely made it out of the group stages. If it were not for his four combined goals against Inter Milan and Borussia Monchengladbach across three appearances, Los Blancos would not have made it into the knockout rounds. An unprecedented feat of incompetence for this great organization, prevented by the clinical clutchness of one of the greatest players in the history of the competition.

Furthering this point, Real Madrid’s attack was, by their standards, historically incompetent. Vinicius Junior missed copious chances. Marco Asensio performed as poorly as we have seen any regular Madrid attacker ever perform. The backups included Mariano Diaz, who very clearly cannot meet the standards necessary at a club aspiring to win trophies.

As much as the arguments in football reductively focus on trophies as a proxy for measuring a player’s impact on a team, perhaps they need to mirror the distinction between Most Valuable Player and Offensive Player of the Year in other sports.

Let me explain. In, for example, the NFL, the Offensive Player of the Year is given to the player who objectively has the best statistics. In the case of the Ballon d’Or this year, that player would be Robert Lewandowski.

Karim Benzema is the ‘MVP’ of world football

But the MVP award is given to the player who is judged to matter more to his team than anyone else. That is a more difficult decision, but it gives space to players who were not able to put up as many “counting” statistics. That could be because of the quality of their supporting cast or the style of play of their teams. The larger point is that if you took this player out of the team, everything would fall apart in a way where the team’s relative success would have been failure.

This is the argument that helps Benzema. Imagine a 2020-2021 Real Madrid side without him. This team would have been at the level below falling giants Juventus, if not worse. They would have missed the Champions League knockout stages entirely and would have been fighting for their lives for a Champions League spot in LaLiga, perhaps even finishing behind Sevilla.

Benzema’s ability to impact the game as a No. 9 and a 10 at the same time is well-documented. What isn’t discussed enough by stats-attached football fans is how Benzema was able to come up big in so many important moments for Madrid. Messi carried a similar importance to Barcelona as Benz to Madrid, but where was he in El Clasico after Benz’s backheel goal? How about in his head-to-head battle with Cristiano Ronaldo in the Champions League? Why didn’t he score any goals against the other title contenders in the league?

Whereas Benzema was elite against all opponents. Of course, I do not want to undermine Messi’s case too much, because, like Benzema, he rivals Lewandowski precisely because of all the work he did throughout the season to keep his team afloat.

It’s just that with Benzema, this aspect of his candidacy has not been explored as in-depth as it has with Messi. Perhaps that’s because his stats in the Euros and to start the 2021-2022 Champions League season have been so breathtaking that they actually do surpass Lewandowski in these specific competitions.

Benzema, thus, brings the best of all worlds. The aesthetics, the clutchness, the leadership, the goals, and the fact that he is the beating heart of Real Madrid each and every week. Lewandowski is not a slam-dunk to win the Ballon d’Or, because whereas Bayern Munich were a well-oiled machine in attack, Benzema was the man with the “S” on his chest and the world on his back for Los Blancos.