‘I don’t know why I got the trophy’: football’s unusual player-of-the-match awards

 “The Inter keeper Yann Sommer was named player of the match against Barcelona despite conceding three goals. He made some great saves so it wasn’t undeserved, but I wondered if there were other unusual PotM awards,” says John Barrow.

This season’s Champions League tie between Real Madrid and Atlético will be remembered for Julián Alvarez’s two-touch penalty being ruled out. Before that Alvarez had inspired Atlético to a 1-0 victory on the night that took the tie to a penalty shootout; he was Uefa’s player of the match. Nick Berry could have written a song about it.

In the modern era players are usually made to pose with their award regardless of the context. Hence the memetastic pictures of Kai Havertz and Alexandra Popp after Germany were eliminated at the group stage of the 2022 and 2023 World Cups, respectively. Both attempted to ascertain whether looks can kill a camera, never mind human beings.

Kevin De Bruyne was almost as unimpressed when he was anointed after Belgium’s scruffy 1-0 win over Canada at Qatar 2022. Online votes were used to decide the player of the match at the tournament, which led to a few eyebrow-raising winners. “I don’t think I played a great game,” said De Bruyne. “I don’t know why I got the trophy, maybe it’s because of the name.”

Christian Eriksen was named player of the match as a symbolic gesture after suffering a cardiac arrest during the match against Finland at Euro 2020. Denmark lost that game 1-0, and Eriksen joined a surprisingly long list of players who have been named player of the match at a major tournament despite their team losing.

The Danes were involved in another such example 19 years earlier when they ended France’s miserable, goalless World Cup defence with a 2-0 victory in Incheon. France had rushed back a half-fit Zinedine Zidane in the hope of a miracle; you can probably guess who took the award. Zidane didn’t play particular badly, but according to Sofascore’s World Cup performance archive – which we think comes from the Opta database – he was the joint-11th best player on the field that day.

A week earlier Rivaldo was the man of the match, as it was called then, after making one and scoring one in Brazil’s 2-1 victory over Turkey. So far, so fair. But that game is remembered solely for his risible playacting in injury time to get Hakan Unsal sent off. Presumably the MotM decision had already been taken and it didn’t occur to anyone that it could be changed, or at least be renamed the Foul Play Award.

We should stress that most of these awards are unusual rather than undeserved. In the Women’s FA Cup final of 2020, Everton keeper Sandy MacIver performed heroically to take the match against Manchester City to extra-time. City’s class eventually told in a 3-1 win but MacIver was player of the match.

Here’s that longer list of individual award-winning players on the losing side at major tournaments. Goalkeepers are in italics, and you’ll probably spot a pattern:

Euro 96 final Czech Republic 1-2 Germany (PotM: Karel Poborsky)

Euro 2000 Netherlands 1-0 Czech Republic (Pavel Nedved); Italy 2-1 Sweden (Henrik Larsson); France 2-1 Italy (Francesco Totti*)

* At least according to this Uefa page. The official technical report of the tournament gives it to Thierry Henry. Anyone got any correction fluid?

World Cup 2002 Denmark 2-0 France (Zinedine Zidane); Germany 1-0 USA (Claudio Reyna)

World Cup 2006 England 0-0 Portugal (1-3 pens, Owen Hargreaves)

World Cup 2014 Italy 0-1 Uruguay (Gianluigi Buffon); Belgium 2-1 USA (Tim Howard); Netherlands 2-1 Mexico (Guillermo Ochoa); Netherlands 0-0 Costa Rica (4-3 pens, Keylor Navas)

World Cup 2018 Croatia 1-1 Denmark (3-2 pens, Kasper Schmeichel)

World Cup 2019 England 1-0 Argentina (Vanina Correa); Netherlands 2-1 Canada (Christine Sinclair); USA 3-0 Chile (Christiane Endler)

Euro 2020 Denmark 0-1 Finland (Christian Eriksen)

The Keylor Navas award in 2014 is especially interesting because the match is remembered for another goalkeeper – Tim Krul, who was brought on specifically before the penalty shootout and became the hero.

Finally, Ollie Watkins only played nine minutes (plus added time) against the Netherlands in last year’s European Championship semi-final but his dramatic late winner made him an irresistible choice for player of the match.