Another year of Spanish football passed with a couple of entertaining teams and mostly drab and unfocused football. Real Madrid walked the league, only suffering a single loss, and the other teams fell by the wayside. Let’s look at the top performers.
The Tom Starke Award: Best Goalkeeper
Refusing to eradicate them is a fool’s gambit.
There were a couple of players worthy of the spotlight such as Andriy Lunin and Álex Remiro, but ultimately the award must go to Athletic Bilbao’s Unai Simón!
Remiro was marginally more well-rounded when considering qualities in build-up, but Simón was simply levels above in pure shot-stopping. With Bilbao seemingly stuck just outside the European places and losing a core of really good but aged players, it was difficult to imagine them breaking the European spots this season, but the ascendance of Simón was key to their fifth-place finish, a repayment for the years of faith that the club put in him despite some topsy-turvy performances.
The House of Basque was criticised for its perceived coddling of its latest young prospect in goal, but the prince of the land has proven himself a worthy member.
The Dante Award: Best Defender
We squander eons in the darkness, while they seize our triumphs for their own.
There is a mention necessary for Real Madrid who had the best defense in the league but achieved this mostly through combinations and defensive and midfield structure rather than individual qualities. Antonio Rüdiger in particular was elite throughout the season, as well as FC Barcelona’s João Cancelo, but the award goes to Girona’s Eric García.
In a team marked by their expert positional shifts and structure changes, Eric García was the foundation of the entire structure, staying in the same general areas and allowing everyone else to move around him. Having this fulcrum for everything to pivot around was just what Girona needed, as any weaknesses in transition were almost always covered by García who also possesses all the qualities on the ball to start attacks, which he did on numerous occasions with his smart movements and passes. Do not mistake lack of ambition for lack of ability, as García almost always chooses the smart pass rather than the big pass.
Exiled by the Catalonians, the once highly touted youngster has shown himself a more than capable warrior in the newly established colony of Girona.
The Xabi Alonso Award: Best Midfielder
The Mantle of Responsibility for all things belongs to Forerunners alone.
There were quite a few strong candidates for this award, with Federico Valverde and Toni Kroos being standout options as well as Mikel Merino and İlkay Gündoğan, but none compare to one of the best comeback stories of this decade so far, that of Real Betis’ Isco.
Isco was rather unceremoniously dumped from Sevilla in January 2023 after a transfer to Union Berlin fell through after his medical was already completed, leaving him a free agent for the rest of the 2022/23 season. In the summer of 2023, Isco signed for Real Betis, and so began a rebirth no one could have predicted. Isco was simply ridiculous, a genuine candidate for the award of best player overall in Spain and one of the most dangerous players in the entire league. Scoring, creating, moving the ball, recovering the ball, breaking opposition build-up and aiding his own team’s build-up with drops into the centre, Isco became the heart of a Real Betis team that desperately needed a rallying point for the years to come.
Centuries removed from the great early Andalusians, Seville’s smaller lineage has found salvation when it seemed on the brink of entering a dark age.
The Franck Ribéry Award: Best Attacker
Think of my acts as you will, but do not doubt the reality.
Quite a few good contenders for this, Antoine Griezmann and Sávio chief among them as well as Alexander Sørloth, but there is no doubting that the year belonged to Real Madrid, and Vinícius Júnior was beyond instrumental.
Is there a more consistent big game player in the world? I don’t think so. It seems impossible that Vini and Brazilian teammate Rodrygo would get along so well on the pitch since both players seem to want to inhabit the same areas, but their combination has been lethal on the left. Once again, Carlo Ancelotti proved that comprehensive tactics and wide-spanning zones of control are ideas for the hipsters to ponder about, instructing the players to play to their strengths rather than adapting to a philosophy, and it has worked gang-busters. There isn’t much to explore about Vini’s play that hasn’t already been explored, the guy is a global superstar already, you all know him already.
In their bid to reclaim the throne of Spain, Real Madrid has employed a few new tricks, but the blades of their known warriors are as sharp as ever.
The Thiago Award: Spain’s Player of the Year
The Reclamation has already begun, and we are hopeless to stop it.
Jude Bellingham felt inevitable.
Bellingham’s positioning when Real moved the ball upwards deceived a lot of people into thinking he’s a forward masquerading as a midfielder, but the truth is very different. Bellingham was an all-action midfielder, affecting play in every phase of the pitch. From his drops in the half-spaces to aid the full-backs and midfielders in build-up, to his drifts wide to help overload a side before crashing into the box at the last second to get on the end of a ball, to his ability to play his way out of extremely tight spaces and generate chances from those areas, to his relentless harassing of opposition midfielders in the counter-press, there was nothing Bellingham didn’t do, and everything he did, he did to a world class level.
Young Jude becomes canonised in the annals of history for leading a historic charge for Real’s storming of the castle to reclaim their place.
What do you think of our picks? Is there anyone you would have picked instead? Let us know in the discussion below.