MOSCOW, Oct 17 Real Madrid and France striker Karim Benzema received the France Football Ballon d'Or award as the best player of the 2021/22 season. The award ceremony took place on Monday at the Chatelet Theater in Paris. 34-year-old Benzema won the Ballon d'Or for the first time. In 2021, Paris Saint-Germain and Argentina striker Lionel Messi received the award for a record seventh time in his career. In total, the striker played 46 games for Real Madrid last season, scored 44 goals and provided 15 assists. Together with Madrid, he won the championship and the Spanish Super Cup, as well as the Champions League, becoming the top scorer in all three tournaments. He was recognized as the best player in the Champions League (15 goals, 10 of them in the playoffs), and in August he received the award of the best player of the 2021/22 season according to the Union of European Football Associations. Senegalese Sadio Mane also entered the top four, in the past a season playing for Liverpool, and now representing Bayern, the Belgian Kevin De Bruyne from Manchester City and the Pole Robert Lewandowski, who moved from Bayern to Barcelona in the summer. . Manchester City was declared the best club. The Golden Ball was established by France Football in 1956 as a prize for the best footballer of the year in Europe (based on the opinions of a group of sports journalists). In 2010, FIFA and France Football announced the merger of the Ballon d'Or and FIFA Player of the Year awards (determined based on the vote of the captains and coaches of the national teams). In September 2016, France Football announced the end of its partnership with FIFA and returned to the original system for determining the best player of the year.
