Rodrygo Wins World’s Best Young Player Award, Beats Ansu Fati

The football season may still be in abeyance, but that doesn’t mean that awards will go to waste.

It was recently announced that Real Madrid winger, Rodrygo Goes, has been named as the winner of Goal’s NxGn 2020 award, which is voted for by journalists from its 43 worldwide websites.

It’s a gong that is given to players who are deemed to be the next stars of the game. Importantly, the only players that can qualify to win are those that have been born on or after January 1, 2001.

Some illustrious names have won the award in previous years, eg Gianluigi Donnarumma and Jadon Sancho amongst others.

Though Rodrygo has had a sound enough start to life in Spain, scoring a hat-trick in one of his earliest appearances for Los Blancos, he’s been little more than a bit-part player for Zinedine Zidane in 2019/20.

To that end, it was a surprise to many that he was handed the top prize ahead of Barcelona’s Ansu Fati.

Injuries played their part in seeing Fati get a good deal more first team action than his contemporary, and he certainly took his chance.

The club’s youngest ever scorer, the youngest ever scorer in the Champions League, the youngest player to score at the Camp Nou, the youngest Barcelona player to score and assist in the same game…

It’s likely that some of those records will never be beaten, and yet that appears to have counted for nothing in the final reckoning.

“There is no point in winning the award, but not following up on the field,” Rodrygo said after receiving his trophy. “I think this award motivates me a lot, gives me a lot of confidence. I hope that happens, that I continue this current season very well.”

Quite when the rest of the season will resume is anyone’s guess at the moment, but the 2020/21 campaign is a more realistic target for the youngster to aim for in terms of more regular employment in Real’s starting line-up.

It will be interesting to see how Zidane utilises him in that season, given that Gareth Bale is still showing no signs of moving on, Eden Hazard will absolutely kick on from a poor start in Madrid, and there’s still the likes of Vinicius Junior, Lucas Vazquez and Karim Benzema to fit into the equation.

It’s all well and good Florentino Perez hoovering up the best young talent in world football, but it’s a travesty if they’re then expected to either rot in the youth team or be sat twiddling their thumbs on the bench.

It’s debatable that Rodrygo will be able to use the winning of the award as leverage to push for a starting place too, so he’ll need to let his feet do the talking.

All coaches profess to want to have difficulty in picking their XIs, and that’s the position that the Brazilian wants to put himself in. Making it virtually impossible for the Frenchman to overlook him.

Time will tell if he can stake his claim or is another flash in the pan.