I think it’s going to be Luka Modric in 2018. He was great as a midfielder and did really well that season both for Real Madrid and for his country in the World Cup Croatia, but so did Ronaldo. He scored a hat-trick in the World Cup, played really well for Portugal. And he was the leading top scorer in UCL and scored a bicycle kick against a prestigious club like Juventus. And yet he was snubbed.
I think the reason he was snubbed was because he was leaving Real Madrid at the time and Perez didn’t want a player that doesn’t play for Madrid to win. It’s still crazy to this day how Ronaldo didn’t even win the Pukas award or the Ballon D’Or that season.
The only right answer to this is Juventus, they have player 9 finals and only won 2. They were the better team in most of the finals they lost.
It’s honestly baffling to me how their isn’t a bigger uproar on this issue right now… English clubs are quite literally outspending other leagues by a metric of 2x or even more in some cases. Even smaller clubs from England are able to spend 40M to get the players they want and these are clubs that no one knows about outside of England.
Premier League fans are very vocal and quite hostile towards the Saudi League for the same reason because they are doing the same thing PL has been doing to other European leagues in the past decade.
I get that EPL came to the top with honest work and I applaud them for it but there comes a time when the gap is getting so enormous that the authorities need to step in and rectify it before it’s too late. Because if it continues like this then there is no need for a Champions League because clubs from the other European Leagues would be minnows compared to what English clubs can do… at that point, it would be better to simply make PL the new UCL then because they would collectively have more talent than the rest of Europe…