Sportskeeda Football 2018 Awards: 5 most memorable moments of the year
2018 has been a pretty amazing year in the world of football, with some tremendous action in the leagues across Europe and in the 2017/18 Champions League, as well as in the dramatic World Cup in Russia in the summer.
We’ve hardly been short of iconic moments to discuss, meaning it was hard to whittle this category down to just 5, but the following stood out more than any others and will probably be spoken about for years to come.
Here are the 5 most memorable football moments of 2018.
#5 Modric wins the Ballon d’Or
The Ballon d’Or has been the premier award for individual footballers for years now, and in some ways, it’s almost as valued as winning a trophy with a team. Unsurprisingly, over the past decade it’s been dominated by 2 players; Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.
The two have 5 Ballon d’Or wins each, and before 2018, you’d have to go back to 2007 and Kaka to find an alternative winner. That’s why it was such a breath of fresh air this year when Luka Modric of Real Madrid and Croatia was named the winner in December.
It’s not like Ronaldo or Messi had bad years; both men scored iconic goals, in fact – Ronaldo in the Champions League, Messi in the World Cup – but there were few arguments against Modric receiving the award.
The diminutive playmaker was the key man in Croatia’s march to the World Cup final, even if they lost to France in the final, and he scored one of the best goals of the tournament against Argentina. And he was equally important to Real as they won their third Champions League in a row, appearing in 14 of their games in Europe including the final.
Whether this marks the end of Ronaldo and Messi’s overall dominance is yet to be determined, but it was a tremendous and well-deserved capper to what has been a brilliant career for Modric – and fittingly, he dedicated his award to all the great players who missed out on it during the past decade.