The announcement of Ballon d'Or 2014 winner is just two weeks away and you probably have your own bet now. The three final nominees for the most prestigious individual award in football are Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and Manuel Neuer. So far, it is the Real Madrid star who dominates talks about the award. However, if it is Barcelona forward Pedro that you will ask, he thinks it should be his teammate Lionel Messi that should win.
"Ronaldo has accumulated good statistics in the past year," Pedro said after Barcelona's charity match on Friday. "But Leo Messi is superior to everyone. He must win the Ballon d'Or"
Maybe Pedro is just playing safe on his Ballon d'Or 2014 winner choice because he is teammates with Messi. Just the other day, another Barcelona player picked the Argentine superstar over Cristiano Ronaldo. He even said that the Real Madrid star should not even be in top three for the mere fact that he and his country Portugal flopped in the 2014 Brazil FIFA World Cup.
'The thing is, Cristiano didn't do much in the World Cup and I think that in the year of the World Cup that defines much of the season," Xavi told Spanish paper Sport when asked about the 2014 Ballon d'Or 2014 candidates.
Meanwhile, Bayern Munich's Manuel Neuer is not expecting much about the award. For him, he don't think he will be announced as the Ballon d'Or 2014 winner because he is not a global brand like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.
"I'm certainly not favourite," the Bayern Munich star told German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.
"The other two are international 'marques', they've clearly got an advantage."
However, for his coach in Germany, Joachim Lowe, Neuer has all the qualifications to be proclaimed as Ballon d'Or 2014 winner.
"Manuel deserves this reward, he's taken the game to a new dimension," Loew told domestic news agency SID, subsidiary to AFP.
