The World Player of the Year, or 2014 FIFA Ballon d’Or award winner will be announced at the Gala ceremony in Zurich on January 12 with Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi of Barcelona and Bayern Munich’s Manuel Neuer vying for the title.
Ronaldo and Messi have won the past six ‘Player of the year’ awards between themselves. While Ronaldo has won it twice, once last year and once in 2008, Messi has picked it up four times already.
Portugal captain, Ronaldo, 29, scored a remarkable 61 goals in the calendar year as he helped his club win the Champions League, Copa del Rey and UEFA Super Cup before ending 2014 by securing the Club World Cup.
German World Cup-winning goalkeeper Manuel Neuer has an outside chance of upsetting the odds. If he does, the gifted 28-year-old stopper will become just the second goalkeeper to claim the prestigious accolade.
Messi finished in the top two in each of the last seven years but, despite another prolific year in 2014, appears this time to be lagging behind his two rivals.
Newsmobile profiles all the three nominees and spells out their chances.
Cristiano Ronaldo
This Real Madrid superstar has been there and done that. Skipper of the Portuguese national team and forward of the Spanish team Real Madrid, Cristiano Ronaldo is actually the defending champion this time around. So, the dude has a lot at stake. Playing for Real Madrid and previously Manchester United, Ronaldo has spent 29,614 minutes on field, with 281 goals in 373 appearances. In 2014 alone, he scored 20 goals from his 12 appearances.
For Portugal, he has spent a total of 9112 minutes on field, scoring 52 goals from 118 appearances. This year, he scored 2 goals from 2 appearances.
This year has been a blessed one for him. It started with the  2013–14 UEFA Best Player in Europe Award and followed it up by  becoming the all-time top scorer in the UEFA European Championship (including qualifying) with 23 goals in November last year.
With his two goals, Ronaldo tied second in the list of top scorers in European club competitions with 70 goals. Ronaldo also equalled Lionel Messi’s record of hat-tricks away from home with seven hat-tricks.
Lionel Messi
This football legend needs no introduction. Argentine stalwart Messi not just captains the national side, but also plays for FC Barcelona, scoring a whopping 253 goals for Barcelona and 47 goals for Argentina in his 93 appearances. He’s played for an unbelievable 22,750 minutes for Barcelona and 7,823 minutes for Argentina. He’s by far the more experienced of the other two nominees. However, what matters is what he did in the past one year.
For Barcelona, he scored 10 goals in 13 appearances, whereas for Argentina, he scored 10 goals as well, in 14 matches. 2014 was a relatively eventful year for Messi, with the FIFA World Cup keeping him fully busy, both as a player and as a skipper.
In July, he was among the 10 players shortlisted by the FIFA technical committee for FIFA’s Golden Ball award for the tournament’s best player, which he eventually won. He was the joint-third-highest goalscorer of the tournament, with four goals and an assist and also his beautiful goals against Nigeria and Bosnia and Herzegovina were voted the ninth and eighth best goals of the tournament. In fact, his four Man of the Match awards were the most of any player in the tournament.
Manuel Neuer
‘Sweeper Keeper’ Manuel Neuer was in raging form all through this year.  He made to the list  due to his stellar showings in guarding the net for club and country.
As a goalie, he plays for Bayern Munich and the German national side, which also happened to win the 2014 FIFA World Cup earlier this year. In his 265 appearances in club football, he has spent 23,762 minutes on field, while for Germany; he’s spent 5100 minutes in his 57 appearances.
After keeping clean sheets in group matches against Portugal and the United States, Neuer recorded his third clean sheet of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in the 1–0 quarter-final defeat of France. Neuer personally won the Golden Glove award for the tournament’s best goalkeeper.
Overall, it just about looks like Ronaldo will have a slight edge over Messi this time around, given his performance in this season. However, because it isn’t too many times that a goalie gets nominated; Neuer might just emerge as the underdog and walk away with the cake!