“I like to ask who would you pay the most to watch, rather than who is the best,” emails Fin, a bit of a follow-on from the email Josh sent regards Ronaldinho. Out of the current players my top three would be Yamal, Kvaratskhelia and Olise.”

They are probably our foremost artists, though I also love Pedri for that. As it goes, Dembélé was once in that category, then became a more serious accumulator.

“Joining a long line of people who say this popularity contest, leaked to you by Fabrizio, is dead to them after an injustice,” laments Jakob Mathiszig-Lee. “Nedved over Henry in 03 for me, but there’s plenty of others, Sneijder in 10 and Lewandowski in 20 and 21.”

I agree, those Messi/Ronaldo years were suboptimal. Essentially, Nedved got it for one performance, Juve v Real Madrid in the Champions League – though I actually think Ruud van Nistelrooy would’ve won the domestic awards were the voting done later in the season.

“How many of these candidates actually make you smile for the quality of their football and skills?” wonders Josh Goldblatt. “Maybe Lamine, but the last entertainer surely was Ronaldinho, 2005 winner.”

You set them up and I’ll stick them away: here’s a piece about the wonder of O Bruxo.

Otherwse, I think Olise is that type of player though not, of course that type of quality – perhaps yet – likewise Mbappé. I mean look at this from last week.

“Re ‘he’s the best finisher from 12-22 yards I’ve ever seen,’” begins Geoff Wignall. “I get that you’re too young to have seen Greaves, Eusebio, Best, Law or Cruyff – let alone Puskas, whom I also never saw - but are you really claiming he’s better from that range than Messi? ‘Cause he ain’t.”

I’m too young to have seen them in the flesh, but Denis Law was a penalty-box player, likewise Greaves. Best’s goalscoring is underappreciated – from 64-65 to 71-72, he scored 14, 17, 10, 32, 22, 23, 22, 27 – but he wasn’t as deadly from the edge of the box as Kane and I don’t think Messi was either. He is as good with curlers, but not the low-backlift laces.

“Your rationale for Kane not winning is just weird,” reckons Emmanuel Dairo. “Lamine had perhaps the worst World Cup of a certified superstar outside maybe post-elite Ronaldo in 2022. I don’t think it’s up for debate that Kane performed better in USA than him overall. As for playing for the best team argument, so did Yamal, and I’d go as far as saying Kane being a space-vacating cenre-forward was a big part of why someone like Michael Olise blossomed. Finally, for all Mbappe’s brilliance, his efforts ultimately led to nothing for club or country, unlike Kane.”

Olise was brilliant at Palace, which is why Bayern bought him and also brilliant for France – his performance against Senegal was better than any Kane delivered at the World Cup.

On Lamine, I think his work in La Liga is worth more than Kane’s in the Bundesliga, and he delivered in the World Cup semi, when, I’m afraid, Kane shrunk and, on Mbappe, I can’t be differentiating Kane from him by virtue of a title won with Bayern, given they’d managed 11 in a row before he arrived and Mbappe. brilliant at the World Cup, has the explosive ability that I want in my personal concepption of what a centre-forward should be.

“The Ballon d’Or is dead to me,” writes Marek Wojenski. “In the last decade or two it’s been a public relations contest but what finally did it was the cancellation of the award in 2020.
Lewandowski should have won it. Yes, as a Poland fan, I am bitter as we’re not likely to have another Polish candidate in my lifetime.”

I don’t know about that – we’ve had two in mine, the other being Zibi Boniek, and three since 1974, Kazimierz Deyna the missing man.

Talking of UK winners, it’s absolutely insane to think that, in 1968, three winners – Denis Law, Bobby Charlton and George Best – played in the same Manchester United team. Now, though, despite the money in the Premier League and with the exception of Erling Haaland and Bruno Fernandes, the best attackers are found in La Liga and Ligue 1. That looks likely to change only in the next generation and only if English clubs develop their own elite talent

Why, then, am I not going for Kane, seeing as you don’t ask. It’s a strange one given he’s the best finisher from 12-22 yards I’ve ever seen, and has reinvented his position, a prolific goalscorer but also a playmaker. However throughout his career, he’s not quite done it in the biggest games, and I just can’t anoint him the planet’s best for this season when he couldn’t get it done in the closing stages of either World Cup or Champions League – again. Killing the Bundesliga in by far its best team, even without him, and a brace against DR Congo, just isn’t enough, and ultimately, that’s why I’m going for Lamine – though, if you asked me who I think the best player in the world is, I’d probably say Mbappé, just.

So who should win? In the women’s competition, I’m going for the wondrous Alexia Putellas; I’m not sure many will argue to the contrary.

The men’s competition is a harder choice. I can’t decide between Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal, but I’m going for Lamine because he inspired Barcelona to the title and was easily the better of the two in the World Cup semi; in third, I’d go for Michael Olise, but I’m sure Harry Kane will be on the podium.

One of the things we love about football is that, in a fickle world of questions, it offers us definitive answers. The best team in the league is the team which wins the league; in order to be certain who deserves to win a match, we’ve devised a handy metric to tell us, known as the score; and should we ever be unsure as to what silly haircut we should have next, what histrionic we should practise, or how best to flout authority, the beautiful game will surely supply us with an answer.

The Ballon d’Or, though, is a different state of affairs. Though the game offers us no parameters for judgment, it being a team sport, often it’s obvious which players have been the world’s best over a season. On other occasions, though, it’s a matter of criteria and opinion, which is where we find ourselves this evening.

But this term, we’ve no outstanding candidate on either men’s or women’s side, which allows us to enjoy plenty of conjecture and opinion, deconstructing this wonderful thing of ours to examine its constituent parts. Are we honouring the best or the most effective? Should we be looking for reliability or inspiration, impact or output, consistent excellence or big-game decisiveness? The next few hours will tell us what one journalist from each of the top 100 countries in the Fifa rankings think but, something else we love about football is that whenever decision is made and whatever it is, there’ll always be people desperate to tell those responsible why they’re wrong. Let’s do it!

Showtime: 7pm GMT