THE single most interesting thing about tomorrow night’s Ballon d’Or ceremony won’t be the winner. There’s no mystery there. Barring some act of God, Lionel Messi will win his fourth Ballon d’Or. Voters reward the biggest stars who do best in the biggest games, particularly when they score goals. Messi won the Treble, reached the Copa America final and then picked up the Fifa Club World Cup to boot.

The more interesting question is whether the world’s biggest footballing popularity contest will determine a sort of passing of the torch, with Neymar surpassing Messi’s eternal adversary, Cristiano Ronaldo.

A bit like the Academy Awards, there’s plenty of guesswork involved; who knows what, say, Moise Poida coach of Vanuatu, one of the voters, thinks or how much European football he watches? And, like the Oscars, there’s a should win/will win dichotomy. The “should win” – or, finish second behind Messi in this case – leans towards Neymar. Ronaldo, not surprisingly, has scored more goals in 2015: 54 to Neymar’s 42. Take out the penalties though and the gap is a far more contained 44 to 38. What’s more, both scored in 30 club games, evidence that Ronaldo’s goals tend to come in bunches, often against bad opponents.

Then there’s the basic point that while Neymar was winning everything in sight – the Copa America, with his group-stage red card and subsequent long ban, being the exception and a notable mark against him – Ronaldo was unable to elevate Real Madrid. And that is something that ought to matter. Because while it’s true that Neymar benefits from playing with Messi (and Luis Suarez), it’s not as if Ronaldo’s supporting cast is made up of a bunch of guys he found in a street corner. And, if anything, the way Neymar has suppressed his ego and agreed to play a productive second fiddle to Messi is commendable.

Whether that’s enough to sway an electorate – captains and managers of national teams, plus select journalists, one from each member nation – that is hugely varied in terms of the football it consumes and the way it consumes it remains to be seen. Uruguay captain Diego Godin plays against these guys in real life, ... his colleague from Montserrat, at best, watches them on TV and plays against them on Fifa. The impression is that there is still enough of a combination of commercial hype, partisanship and folks making decisions simply on the number of goals scored that Ronaldo will edge out Neymar for second place.

But if that’s how things work out, it may well be the final year of the Messi-Cristiano duopoly. Neymar is seven years his junior and Real Madrid, for a number of reasons, not just age and a possible goal-scoring decline – have started to view him as no longer untouchable.

Put a big enough offer together and you can bring Florentino Perez to the negotiation table. And that’s not something you expect for a guy on the three-man Ballon d’Or Shortlist.

AFTER telling us that he would not be extending his contract with Bayern Munich, which expires at the end of the season, Pep Guardiola took the next logical step in the slow drip of information regarding his future. He explained that he wasn’t staying because he wanted to work in the Premier League. And he added that while he has had several offers, he had not yet decided which club he would like to manage.

And so the game goes on. Maybe the next instalment will see him narrow it down further, perhaps between London (“A cosmopolitan world capital, culturally stimulating!”) and Manchester (“They live and breath football there, plus I like that Lowry guy.”)

You struggle to think of another manager in the game’s history capable of holding the world’s elite clubs to rapt attention. Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City and, while the official line is that Arsene Wenger remains entrenched,surely nobody doubts that if he became obsessed with managing Arsenal, they would find a way to accommodate him too?

This is a manager-as-Messiah situation, a belief that one man can transform the fortunes of any club to a degree that makes it worth waiting and trying to seduce him, rather than the other way around.

While some continue to peddle the line that everything is signed and sealed with City (something which all parties vehemently deny), the impression is that either he genuinely hasn’t committed or he has committed but has enough of a get-out that, should he change his mind, he could go elsewhere. And that’s what keeps hope alive. That’s why the other pretenders haven’t given up on pursuing him.

IN addition to the perpetual folly of the Bernabeu, Zinedine Zidane’s appointment as manager of Real Madrid prompted two rather more interesting debates. One is the basic point of whether a man with 18 months coaching experience and a personality that ranges from the taciturn and introverted to the volcanic (his 14 red cards for club and country tell their own story) is suited to a job that is part- coach (something he can presumably do), part-psychologist, part-carnival barker. The jury is out on that.

The other is the age-old debate of the genuine superstar achieving similar heights as a manager. We can all cite plenty who never tried or tried and failed or tried and were merely ordinary yet stuck around (Ferenc Puskas and Zico managed 22 teams between them).

It’s probably safe to say that the only guys in Zidane’s ballpark in terms of recognised footballing achievement who scaled similar heights as managers are Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Alfredo Di Stefano and Kenny Dalglish. And, of those, Cruyff and Beckenbauer had relatively short careers, while Di Stefano and Dalglish had some rather deep lows to go with the undoubted highs.

Then again, Zidane doesn’t need to reach that level. Or, rather, if he does, it’s a plus. His mandate is to keep Real Madrid from falling further, be respectable in the Champions League, finish in the top two and oversee the summer clear-out as per the plan that Florentino Perez has been hatching.

The bar might not be quite as high for him as it was for previous Real Madrid bosses. But, heck, it’s still a crap-shoot.