MADRID, 17 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Spanish international and FC Barcelona player Alexia Putellas won the women’s Ballon d’Or for the 2021-2022 season on Monday, an award that joins the one achieved last year and confirms her as the great star of world women’s football.
The 28-year-old Barça captain, currently recovering from her serious knee injury, has once again raised the prestigious trophy awarded by her country’s sports magazine ‘France Football’, which on this occasion has changed its selection criteria to reward the football season instead of the calendar year, all after a year of ups and downs.
With his second consecutive ‘Golden Ball’ (2021 and 2022), Putellas becomes the first Spanish footballer, male or female, to win this award twice, which only another player from the country, Luis Suárez, has managed to win (1960 ). The Catalan surpassed the English Beth Mead (Arsenal) and the Australian Sam Kerr (Chelsea), who repeated her third place last year. The Spanish Aitana Bonmatí, teammate of the winner, was fifth.
In addition, she is the first woman to do so in two consecutive editions, after seven men have achieved it: the Dutchman Johan Cruyff (1973-74), the Englishman Kevin Keegan (1978-79), the German Karl-Heinz Rummenigge (1980 -81), Frenchman Michel Platini (1983-85), Dutchman Marco van Basten (1988-89), Leo Messi (2009-12 and 2019-21) and Cristiano Ronaldo (2013-14 and 2016-17).
The one from Mollet del Vallès, who received the prize from the hands of the former Ukrainian striker Andriy Shevchenko, is thus rewarded for an almost perfect course with the only blemish of the defeat in the final of the ‘Champions’ against the French Lyon, a competition in which Despite everything, she was named ‘MVP’ and finished as top scorer, with 11 goals.
Along with FC Barcelona, ??he achieved the national treble – Liga, Copa de la Reina and Supercopa de España – and closed the season with 34 goals in 42 official matches, in which he also contributed 18 assists. In the domestic competition, only her partner Asisat Oshoala (20) and the Brazilian Geyse Ferreira (20), now a culé and then at Madrid CFF, scored more goals than the Catalan (18).
Only the rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament of the left knee days before the start of the European Championship in England frustrated the year of Putellas, who has still received the recognition of the 50 members of the French award jury.
