European player of the year. Deserves a comment – 19 players got points by the ranking of different journalists. Of them, only two did not play at the World Cup: Nilsson (1.FC Kaiserslautern, Sweden) and Schuster (Barcelona, West Germany). Six were champions of the world and 3 silver medalists at the World Cup. One may argue that some players deserved at least more and higher votes: Breitner and Tresor ended with 1 point, Gerets with 2 points, Platini with 5. Meantime Rummenigge had 47 – and was 5th in the final ranking. May be too much, but never mind. Bruno Conti was 4th with 48, Zbigniew Boniek – 3rd with 53, Alain Giresse – 2nd with 68. And number one, practically without any competition – Paolo Rossi with 115 points. The absolute maximum was 130 – so, the votes were overwhelmingly for him.
Number one – the best European this year.
Of course, World Cup performance always counts most and Rossi ended as world champion, top scorer, and best player of the finals. Remarkable, especially after considering that he missed about 2 years of football because of suspension.
Of course, Rossi was noted as great talent back at the1978 World Cup, so his development was only natural. He was a hero.
Heroes can also cook – if they are world champions and playing for very strong Juventus. But cooking should be taken here with more than a grain of salt. Such a massive voting for Rossi tells us he was fantastic player having fantastic season. Form the distance of time, it was just so… but bigger names did not win the award after a fantastic season, or win it, but with much fewer points. There were rivalries before, it was difficult to decide who was best, even if bias is discarded. This year only two voices differed: the Scotish and the Belgian voters. They argued that Rossi played only 3 great matches in the whole year. Which was… true. It was not steadily overwhelming performance – Rossi was voted number one thanks to the last three matches at the World Cup. That was all. Yes, he scored 6 goals in them, thus helping Italy to the title, but was he the most important player in the team? Hardly. Of course, every voting for ‘the best’ is suspect under close scrutiny, but, not only in my opinion, the voting for the European Player of the Year was questionable for quite some time – more or less, ever since 1975. Players got the award on reputation rather than performance, or just because they shined in few important games. The European and World finals overshadowed the rest of the season. Most often the fall did not count at all, voting concentrating on the spring, when the European cups finished. If the whole year was really taken into account, may be Platini, Gerets, Dassaev, Breitner, and Boniek had to get more points at the expense of Rossi. The voting was a bit sheepish, going after the hype and cooking clay giants. It is not to say Paolo Rossi was not a fine player, but that huge a star? Even in purely Italian context he was not. But voting is voting and he was number one. For myself, I preferred Rossi in 1978 – but nobody asked me, so there.