Neymar has backed his Brazil teammate Vin\u00edcius J\u00fanior for the Ballon d\u2019Or award after his impressive season at Real Madrid.<\/p>\n
Vin\u00edcius, was named as the 2023-24 Champions League Player of the Season on Monday after scoring six goals in this season\u2019s competition, including Madrid\u2019s second in the 2-0 win against Borussia Dortmund in Saturday\u2019s final at Wembley.<\/p>\n
The 23-year-old , who will lead also scored 13 goals as Madrid won LaLiga.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs for Vini, obviously I think the Ballon d\u2019Or is his today,\u201d Neymar<\/p>\n
\u201cI sent [him] messages before and after the [Champions League final] game. He\u2019s a boy I love with passion, a great friend that football gave me. He will certainly be crowned with the Ballon d\u2019Or.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s incredible. Carrying our country\u2019s flag around the world and we\u2019re really rooting for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
The last Brazilian to win the Ballon d\u2019Or was AC Milan great Kaka in 2007.<\/p>\n
Neymar, who is Brazil\u2019s all-time leading scorer, has often been a contender for the prestigious individual award but never won.<\/p>\n
The closest the 32-year-old came was a third-place finish in 2015 behind winner Lionel Messi and runner-up Cristiano Ronaldo.<\/p>\n
Neymar is still recovering from a serious knee injury he suffered while on international duty in October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Neymar has backed his Brazil teammate Vin\u00edcius J\u00fanior for the Ballon d\u2019Or award after his impressive season at Real Madrid. Vin\u00edcius, was named as the 2023-24 Champions League Player of the Season on Monday after scoring six goals in this season\u2019s competition, including Madrid\u2019s second in the 2-0 win against Borussia Dortmund in Saturday\u2019s final […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":30077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[983,984],"class_list":["post-33803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","tag-neymar","tag-vini-jr"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33803"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33804,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33803\/revisions\/33804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}