Off the Crossbar: Cristiano Ronaldo supports claims that Lionel Messi “stole” the Ballon d’Or

Cristiano Ronaldo has been quite busy on social media this week with discussions of the Ballon d’Or and the Portuguese striker even publicly backed claims from a fan account that Lionel Messi stole the Ballon d’Or this year. Ronaldo finished sixth in voting this year and was certainly not happy with this result. He believes himself or Bayern Munich’s Robert Lewandowski is truly deserving of this award.

The Manchester United forward commented “facts” underneath a fan post detailing why Ronaldo deserved the prize over Messi. It is not much surprise to see Ronaldo taking the side of a fan account, but many will see this as petty and unnecessary.

The post comes from a fan account called ‘Cristiano Ronaldo — The Legendary’ which Ronaldo himself follows. This post describes Messi’s accolade as “Theft. Dirt. Shame. Simply regrettable.” Pretty harsh claims considering Messi himself did nothing wrong, and the mistake is on France Football.

Ronaldo is contradicting himself a little when he said earlier in the week claims about his career ambition to end his career with more Ballon d’Or’s than Messi was a lie. While maybe it isn’t his career ambition, it is clearly something he cares a lot about.

‘The biggest ambition of my career is to be a good example for all those who are or want to be professional footballers. The biggest ambition of my career is to leave my name written in golden letters in the history of world football,” said Ronaldo on Instagram.

Although you can’t blame Ronaldo for caring about these things because of how respected these individual awards are and how much emphasis we put on these awards. How Messi won the award with scoring just one goal so far in Ligue 1 is beyond ridiculous and the number of people that continue to speak out against this year’s result tells you something. Lionel Messi simply did not deserve the award.