{"id":1350,"date":"2014-12-03T22:50:55","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T21:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/?p=1350"},"modified":"2014-12-03T22:50:55","modified_gmt":"2014-12-03T21:50:55","slug":"who-was-the-best-soccer-player-in-the-world-in-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/who-was-the-best-soccer-player-in-the-world-in-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Who was the best soccer player in the world in 2014?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Ballon d\u2019Or award too often favors offensive players, high scorers, and World Cup winners.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/lead.jpg\" alt=\"lead\" width=\"100%\" height=\"\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1351\" \/><\/p>\n<p>FIFA, the ethically challenged arbiter of the world\u2019s most popular sport, has proposed a short-list of three for the Ballon d\u2019Or, the top individual accolade: Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and Manuel Neuer. Like most sports awards, fans are rooting for their favorites\u2014but unlike many others, it\u2019s hard to make a statistical case that one player is more valuable than another. That often makes the award merely a measure of prolific goal-scoring\u2014but as any manager will tell you, that\u2019s probably not enough to carry a successful soccer team. How can we improve?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Ballon d\u2019Or award too often favors offensive players, high scorers, and World Cup winners. FIFA, the ethically challenged arbiter of the world\u2019s most popular sport, has proposed a short-list of three for the Ballon d\u2019Or, the top individual accolade: Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and Manuel Neuer. Like most sports awards, fans are rooting for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports"],"views":1877,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1352,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}