Robert Lewandowski wins the IFFHS World Player of the Year, is the Ballon d’Or next?

It’s official — for the second year in a row, Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski has won the IFFHS World’s Best Player award. He beat second placed Leo Messi by 45 points in the voting. While the winner of France Football’s prestigious Ballon d’Or is yet to be announced, Lewy’s win will give fans hope that he’ll finally get the recognition he deserves.

Lewandowski has been the best player in the world by some margin this year, breaking Gerd Muller’s legendary Bundesliga scoring record and generally being a complete menace to opposition defenses. He won the European Golden Boot and is the top scorer of the Champions League this season, and shows no signs of slowing down (unlike a certain Argentinian).

Since the actual IFFHS site was hardly verbose in its announcement (and weirdly hard to track down???), here’s the list of players who Lewandowski beat to get the award:

With the Ballon d’Or ceremony scheduled for Monday, let’s hope that this is a hint of things to come. France Football shamefully cancelled the award last season when Lewy was the frontrunner, but this is a chance to make things right.

Will they? Who knows. Let’s wait and see.