Totti should have won Ballon d'Or, says Falcao

Former Roma player Paulo Roberto Falcao believes club legend Francesco Totti should have won the Ballon d'Or at least once over the twenty years of his playing career.

The Italian celebrated two decades of sterling service for the Giallorossi on Thursday and has earned a great many commendations from those in the footballing fraternity.

However, the former Italy international does not have many individual honours to show for those years with only the European Golden Shoe in 2007 providing any recognition of his talents on the continental front.

Indeed, the Ballon d'Or, considered by many to be football's top prize, has only been awarded to five Italians with Fabio Cannavaro the most recent recipient in 2006.
"He deserved to win the Ballon d'Or," Falcao told Tele Radio Stereo.
"Totti has the technique of a South American and deserved to win a few more trophies with his Roma team.

"He is an extraordinary player. When he started, nobody thought he would go on to become so great.

"In Italy it's not easy for kids to come up through the youth academy and impose themselves on the first team, but he managed it and became the symbol of Roma.

"Totti manages to think with his feet and would've done great things with my Roma side in 1982-83."

Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, often the striker's rival on the pitch, also wrote a fitting tribute to the Roma captain.

"Twenty years in Serie A, what an achievement ... I still have the image of your [Totti's] first goal in my mind, it was a Roma-Foggia tie," he wrote in a letter puiblished by ANSA earlier in the week.

"We're friends, you know how much I care about you. We started together with the Under-15 side, we had some splendid years together in the national team and we continue to meet as opponents in Serie A.

"You often score against me (10 times to be precise, that's how many goals you have netted) like a champion who has forgotten our friendship.

"Then, at the final whistle, there are smiles between us again, like when I saved a penalty that I feared you would chip - it saddened me that was you.

"You not only wrote football history, you are writing its present and its near future.

The 36-year-old has scored 226 Serie A goals and revealed in an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport ths week that he aims to cross the 300-mark before the end of his playing career.