Following his spectacular World Cup campaign, Messi has just won his seventh FIFA The Best award.

The player is the biggest winner of the award and one of the greatest of all time, so see everything about Messi and The Best FIFA award.

In a year of ups and downs for the Argentinian, he managed to reinvent himself and surprise everyone.

Understand the criteria, check out who Messi's competitors were, and follow a little of his incredible season for PSG and the Albiceleste team.

The FIFA The Best Award in which Lionel Messi was placed first in the 2022 edition is a vote where the 10 best players of the season are chosen, but only the three best are awarded.

First, a FIFA committee selects 10 of the season's best players to participate in the list.

The votes to define the best player are made by the following groups, each representing 25% of the votes.

After that, each of the participants in the groups above chooses, among these 10 selected, the players who deserve 1st place, 2nd place and 3rd place.

In other words, each coach, captain, journalist and public make their personal ranking, and this will be the criterion to generate points that will classify the players.

Therefore, each of these positions has a score assigned, first place gets five points, second place gets three points and third place gets one point.

Therefore, after all the coaches, journalists, captains and public voting on the internet have defined their top 3, the scores are added according to the criteria above and the list with the ranking of the 10 best players will be defined.

The criteria analyzed in The Best FIFA Award is very simple, the group of voters would need to analyze the player's season between August 8, 2021 and December 18, 2022, including the World Cup. 

The Best FIFA Award and the Ballon d'Or are two distinct awards, one organized by FIFA, and the other by the French magazine France Football.

In 1956, France Football magazine already analyzed players, evaluating their performances with the aim of defining the best European player.

However, FIFA created the Ballon d'Or in 1991 and awarded the best athlete of the year from around the world, and in 2009 the two awards were combined.

So, from 2009 until 2016, the best player award was unified in the FIFA Ballon d'Or, but now, they are two different awards again.

The biggest difference between the two awards is the way the players on the list are defined, while FIFA's The Best award is voted on by the public, captains, journalists, federates and coaches.

The France Football magazine award takes into account the votes of 200 great journalists from around the world.

Messi had an incredible season, scoring 45 goals in 74, and also won Ligue One in 2021/2022.

Not to mention the player's exceptional participation in the World Cup, where with 7 goals in 7 games, he won the biggest title in the history of football.

Messi won the best in the world in the following years, including editions where the FIFA award was unified with that of France Football magazine:

Messi was placed first in the four categories in which he received votes, that is, he came first in the vote of captains, coaches, journalists and fans, totaling 52 points.

Messi had very strong competition against the Frenchman Mbappe, who, like Messi, had an extraordinary campaign.

The two, who are teammates at PSG, faced each other as opponents in the 2022 World Cup final, which ended up being of great importance in deciding who would take first place.

Mbappe received, came second in all four categories, adding 44 points to the total.

Third place also went to Frenchman Karim Benzema, who was the winner of the award from France Football magazine.

The player placed third in the decision of the groups of technical captains and journalists, and fourth in the public vote.

1st Best player:

2nd best player

3rd Best goalkeeper

4th Best goalkeeper

5th Best men's football coach

6th Best female football coach

 7th Puskás Award (most beautiful goal)

So if you want to enjoy Messi's next games, stay tuned to our article.

Firstly, Messi has a meeting scheduled with Bayern Munich in the round of 16 of the Champions League.

And the HBO Max app is the home of the Champions, in this app you can watch all the competition's games.

Another option is via the SBT channel or its SBT Videos app, the Champions League return game will be covered on this channel for free.

And as Messi plays for PSG, in Ligue 1, the perfect app to watch the Argentine in this competition is STAR Plus.

Check out our article below and see in detail how to watch Champions League games.