The nominations for the 2018 Ballon D’Or were announced yesterday, October 8th, and needless to say; our Egyptian king IS nominated. Mo Salah was included in the top 30 list alongside other footballing legends like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Luka Modric, Neymar Jr. and many more incredible players.
As awesome as the nomination itself is, the best thing about it is that a link for public voting was published. Well, and you know what public votes mean for us. As soon as the link was launched, Egyptians literally HIJACKED it, and started sharing it everywhere, making everyone vote for the Liverpool forward!
Today morning Salah was seriously dominating the poll, leading by 52% of the votes, after he was originally 61%! This is HUGE, considering that our boy is running against the world’s best football players of all time.
While we obviously received the fascinating news in all joy and happiness, football fans all over Twitter were extremely FRUSTRATED, and frustrated is an understatement here!
Many football fans on Twitter believe that Salah doesn’t deserve the award, especially since Messi is one of the nominees. And well, Messi has a HUGE fanbase that is now competing man to man against Salah’s (aka us); trying to either take the votes away from the Egyptian, or at least equalize with it.
On the other hand, just like there are people who want the internet cut off on our whole nation so we can’t vote; there are also people who just find the whole thing pretty hilarious. They actually love the fact that we support Salah and are always behind him no matter what! We mean, it does not happen in every country, does it?
The percentage however, is now decreasing because of the somewhat ‘Messi Campaign’ that is operating to take the lead from our golden Egyptian boy, they are unfortunately succeeding so far; but still, we started BIG, got everyone talking and we can do it again.
In a related context, since the new Premier League season kicked off, there have been speculations that Mohamed Salah is a ‘One Season Wonder’. Meaning that he won’t be able to score the same amount of goals he did last season, and that he can’t compete or even come close to the greatness of the rest of the football legends nominated.
With that being said, and as much as it’s only natural that we support our man- because how many Egyptians get nominated for huge individual football awards- Mo Salah’s 18/19 season statistics are actually BETTER than those of the previous season.
Salah is only ONE goal away from the stats of last season, where all the magic happened! So basically, according to the numbers, he’s not doing bad at all, in case anyone thinks otherwise for some reason!
Well, what do you think of the whole ‘Egyptians vs the rest of the world’ ongoing competition on Twitter? Can we win this time, like we did in the Puskas Award and the 80 thousand other awards that involved public voting before?! Or will the Messi squad eventually succeed? Share your thoughts!
