Did Mohamed Salah deserve the price before Ousmane Dembele?

Ousmane Dembele could not hold back his emotions as he thanked his family after winning the Ballon d’Or 2025. His story is resilience. A star boy who threatened to end with a failure, surrounded by injury struggles and a Barcelona movement that simply never clicked. But ultimately a player who is now sitting at the top of the throne of football after having undergone his own reassembly in Paris Saint-Germain.

For all opinions on those who have missed the price, this should not withdraw from the own history of French. No one could have predicted the genius of the new False Nine of Luis Enrique other than the boss of PSG himself. Dembele has become reborn. A player who simply did not score enough has become a player who could not stop doing it.

As the final whistle sounded during the 5-0 challenge of Inter Milan PSG in the Champions League final, Dembele had scored 35 goals and helped 16 others in all competitions, with seven of these contributions coming to the stage with direct elimination of the Europe Elite competition. There are not many who enjoyed a better season than the former man of Barcelona. France Football believes that no player has done so, in fact.

Lamimine Yamal was forced to settle for second place. He is the star boy that Dembele was and much more, but he was forced to wait until the start of his potential era of domination. Vistinha, meanwhile, surprised a lot by placing the third. The chic midfielder played a key role alongside Dembele in the triple PSG last season and won his place among the best in the world of Wolverhampton Wanderers Fails Years before.

And then there is Mohamed Salah in fourth position. Yes, fourth. The Egyptian, who missed the appointment last season in total, did not even manage to make the podium after a year which, according to many, was worthy to win the prize itself.

Why was Salah deprived of the Ballon d’Or

There are not many players who enjoyed a better season than Dembele, as mentioned, but Salah did. The Egyptian created history in the Premier League with more involvement of the objectives than any other player in the history of a season of 38 games and even equaled the record set by Alan Shearer, who needed 42 games. In other words, it was unstoppable.

The Golden Ball Social Media revealed the criteria for winning the prize before the ceremony, declaring that individual performance, decisive and impressive nature, team performance and achievements, class and fair play would decide on the ranking.

Based on the above measures, it seems absurd that Salah finished outside the first three. The only player close to corresponding to him was indeed Dembele, who deserved to be lying with the Egyptian, not kilometers beyond him.

Where Salah lost the Ballon d’Or

In the end, Salah will return to Liverpool vs PSG as a turning point for the Ballon d’Or. Once again, wrongly or wrongly, the Champions League has taken priority about anything else in the spirit of French football. A penalty shootout between two of the best in the world, which has just met in the last 16, has undoubtedly played a big role in the possible victory of Dembele and the snob of Salah.

This is where the price is slightly defective. It is the human nature of leaning towards the recence, but those who vote for the winner of the Ballon d’Or must simply consider the season as a whole rather than the last months before the ceremony. Salah was walking towards his throne in the first half of the campaign, after having recorded 30 goal involvement in the Premier League at the time of the arrival of January.

Dembele, on the other hand, was still to begin. The striker had recorded 13 goal involvement of the league and had found the bottom of the net only eight times. It was far from a worthy golden ball. We now know, of course, that the genius of Enrique quickly played a role and the best of French was unlocked, but it was Salah who sought the course of the famous prize.

The man of Liverpool has nowhere, adding 17 other goal involvement to his name before the end of the Premier League campaign. Alas, somewhere along the way, the glow of the Trophy of the Champions League of PSG blinded France football to the history that Salah had created.

For the moment, the Egyptian king of Liverpool is forced to wait for his moment of singing on the biggest scene in football. That his time comes at all is now the big question. If that does not happen, Salah will undoubtedly join Andres Iniesta and Thierry Henry as one of the greatest players to miss the price.