Individual accolades have eluded all-time great Kroos

Opinion

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This article was published 31/05/2024 (465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Champions League Final on Saturday will be a club football curtain call for one of the best, and among the least appreciated, midfielders of his generation.

He’ll be expecting, and expected, to dictate the tempo of a match after which he’ll lift the European Cup – his sixth, equalling Paco Gento’s all-time record.

Winning, after all, is something that comes naturally to Toni Kroos. Almost as naturally as the 30,000 passes he’s completed, give or take, over the course of a glittering career that, should Real Madrid beat Borussia Dortmund at Wembley (2 p.m., DAZN), will see him become the most decorated German footballer ever.

Even that won’t be the end. Not quite, as the 34-year-old will play in the upcoming European Championship, which Germany will host later this month. An international career that yielded a World Cup in 2014 appeared to be finished after an early exit at Euro 2020, but in late March he returned to Die Mannschaft for a friendly in France. He set up Florian Wirtz’s opening goal inside the first 10 seconds.

Appropriately, if somewhat surprisingly, Kroos’s final few weeks before retirement promise something of the poetic. Given everything he’s accomplished, it’s fitting that he should go out like this, even if he is only now enjoying the appreciation that should have followed him for more than a decade.

Almost exactly 11 years ago, the then-Bayern Munich midfielder won his first Champions League after his side defeated Borussia Dortmund at Wembley Stadium — the same opponent he’ll face today, and at the same venue. A year later he completed a €25 million move to Real Madrid, which in retrospect has to be considered one of the great bargains in the history of the transfer market.

What he achieved in the following four years was not only extraordinary, but without parallel.

With Real Madrid, Kroos won La Liga, two UEFA Super Cups, the Supercopa de España, four Club World Cups and three Champions Leagues. With Germany, he lifted the World Cup in Brazil, against whom he scored twice in the famous 7-1 victory in Belo Horizonte.

He was the metronome for both teams, managing the tempo of matches and passing at averages of at least 92 per cent. And yet, he didn’t win a major individual award. Not one.

Only once was Kroos, one of world football’s best ever distributors, voted into the Ballon d’Or’s top 10 – in 2014, the year he won the World Cup. In 2017, when he won both La Liga and the Champions League and led the Spanish top flight in assists, he came in at 17th. Paulo Dybala, Isco and Harry Kane finished higher. An absolute scandal.

Barcelona legend Xavi Hernandez, who won eight Spanish titles, four Champions Leagues and the World Cup while organizing his teams and passing at astronomical efficiency, has previously likened Kroos to himself. The comparison works on the pitch as well as at award ceremonies.

There have also been detrimental voices, and important ones, in evaluating Kroos’s style of play.

Shortly after Germany’s Euro 2020 elimination, national team icon Lothar Mӓtthaus remarked he didn’t agree with how Kroos passed the ball, adding the midfielder was no longer world class. He was hardly alone in holding such views, as the likes of Xavi and Andrea Pirlo could also attest.

Mӓtthaus, thankfully, does not make football decisions. Carlo Ancelotti and Julian Nagelsmann, however, do.

Last weekend, ahead of his team’s final La Liga match in another title-winning season, Madrid manager Ancelotti asserted Kroos was among the best midfielders in the history of the sport. Nagelsmann, the Germany boss, personally reached out to Kroos, convincing him to return to the national set-up for Euro 2024.

Recognition is rarely as well-earned, even if, in this instance, it’s rather late in coming.

Kroos will bow out of club football in the Champions League Final. He’ll retire for good at the final whistle of a match in his own country — perhaps a final there, too.

He may have played the majority of his career turning spotlights on others. For a few weeks at least, the beam will shine directly, and deservedly, on him.

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