The eyes of the Asian continent will turn to the South Korean capital, Seoul, the day after tomorrow, Tuesday, when the annual Continental Confederation Awards ceremony 2023, in its twenty-eighth edition, will be held, amid widespread interest in the award for the best player within the continent in particular first, and then in the award for the best player active outside the continent.
The AFC had named three candidates to compete for the Best Player Award within the continent: Akram Afif, the Qatari national team and Al Sadd club star, along with Jordanian Yazan Al-Naimat, the current Qatari Al Arabi and former Al Ahly player, and the South Korean and Red Star Belgrade player Seol Young-woo. Currently Serbian.
There are five reasons that push Akram Afif to be the most deserving of this award to receive it for the second time in his history, after he was crowned with it in 2019.
It is known that the award – the best player within the continent – which is administered by a specialized technical committee, is subject to point criteria mainly through the system of granting players technical point evaluations, through participation in tournaments, with the number of points allocated in each tournament varying, as the points allocated for the World Cup finals are It is the highest, and then comes the Asian Cup, then the World Cup qualifiers in its various stages, then the Asian Cup qualifiers, then the club championships according to their classification, provided that the technical committee conducts the evaluation, taking into account the individual and collective continental achievements of the players with the teams and clubs during the same world.
The first reason that favors Akram Afif comes from the heart of the evaluation equation, which indicates that the highest points will be for the Asian Cup, as the last edition, 2023, which was held in Doha, coincided with the same evaluation year, 2023, without there being World Cup finals or advanced stages of the World Cup qualifiers. Akram Afif gave a fine performance in all seven matches he played with Al-A’dam, and won the title of best player in the tournament and the title of top scorer, well deserved. Therefore, the highest rating will be for Akram, of course, according to the points system and the vision and other standards of the technical committee related to individual achievements. The collective and the digital outcome.
The second reason lies in the impact of the individual level on the team’s collective achievement, given that Akram was crowned top scorer in the Asian Cup with 8 goals and three assists (i.e., he contributed to 11 goals) out of the 14 goals scored by the Qatari team in the tournament as a whole, and thus he contributed directly to The Qatari team was crowned champion in the tournament, whose most prominent star was par excellence, with an amazing performance that made all observers and followers sing of what the player presented in the tournament, in addition to Afif’s uniqueness in being the only one who was able to score a hat-trick in a final match in the history of the Asian Cup.
The third reason relates to what he presented at the local level in 2023 with his club Al-Sadd, when he led them to win the local double – the Qatari League for the seventeenth time in the club’s history as a record, and to win the Emir Cup title – in addition to Akram being crowned the top scorer in Al-Duwai, scoring 26 goals and providing 11 goals. He made an assist, contributing to a total of 37 goals out of the 65 goals his team scored in the league.
The fourth reason comes from another local evaluation, as Akram Afif won the Qatar Football Association Award as the best player in the last season 2023-2024 in general, which is an individual achievement that undoubtedly counts for the player in the evaluation.
The fifth reason lies in the large differences between Akram and his competitors for the continental award. Jordanian Yazan Al-Naimat relies mainly on the Asian Cup only, where he was remarkably prominent after scoring four goals and assisting two goals to contribute six goals, but his individual achievement is not compared to what he accomplished. Akram Afif in the same tournament, after he contributed 11 goals, and won the title of best player in the tournament and its top scorer at the same time, at a time when the Qatari team won the title at the expense of the Jordanian team itself, which finished as runner-up, in the final match during which Afif scored three goals/ Hat-trick/ versus a goal by Yazan Al-Naimat.
In the same comparison, South Korean Seol Young-woo, who plays in the defense line, only assisted one goal in the 2023 Asian Cup with his country, which left the tournament in the semi-finals against the Jordanian team.
At the club level, Akram excels in the achievements he achieved with Al-Sadd and being crowned top scorer and best player in the Qatari League, while Yazan Al-Naimat was content with finishing tenth with his former club Al-Ahly in the Qatari League, before joining Al-Arabi at the beginning of the current season, while the player achieved… Seoul won the South Korean League title with Ulsan FC and reached the semi-finals of the AFC Champions League (2023-2024), before moving to the Serbian team Red Star Belgrade last June.
If Akram Afif is crowned the best, it will be the second time for the player who won the same award in 2019, and he then became the third Qatari player to win it after Khalfan Ibrahim, who won the title in 2006, and Abdul Karim Hassan, who won it in 2018.