The results are in from The Best FIFA Football Awards 2025, and several Arsenal figures earned mentions.
Mikel Arteta earned votes for the best manager, and Declan Rice finished runner-up in the race for the Puskas award, celebrating the best goal of the year.
There were some surprises along the way, as expected, firstly that no Arsenal player made the best XI of the year and secondly, who voted who.
Martin Odegaard didn’t vote for Arteta as the best manager, choosing Luis Enrique instead, but that wasn’t the biggest surprise of the award ceremony’s voting.
Which Arsenal player can feel MOST aggrieved for missing out on the best XI of 2025?
Gianluigi Donnarumma voted Wojciech Szczesny as his goalkeeper of the year
Players around Europe voted in the awards, and one of Gianluigi Donnarumma’s selections was a former Arsenal star.
Voting for the goalkeeper of the year, Donnarumma was one of two players to vote for Wojciech Szczesny, the other was his club and country teammate, Robert Lewandowski.
Arsenal let Szczesny leave for just £10m back in 2017 on the back of two loan spells away from the club following his infamous smoking incident at St Mary’s in 2015.
Despite Szczesny’s best efforts to turn things around, he never made his way back to the top at Arsenal, but his career didn’t by any means end there.
Put it this way, very few would’ve expected the Poland international to be nominated as the best goalkeeper in the world a decade after he was caught smoking at Southampton away.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Donnarumma’s vote is that he placed Szczesny ahead of David Raya, putting Arsenal’s current number one in his top three.
The final ranking for FIFA’s goalkeeper of the year was a surprise
Harry Kane and Virgil van Dijk also had Raya in their top three, but the Spaniard just missed out on bronze in the final rankings.
We want to know how YOU would rank the top eight goalkeepers in the world in 2025. Comment below!
Donnarumma won the prize, with Thibaut Courtois as the runner-up and Alisson in third place.
Raya finished fourth, ahead of Manuel Neuer, Yann Sommer, Emi Martinez and Szczesny, who finished eighth.
Individual awards always split opinion, take Thierry Henry’s snub at the 2003 Ballon d’Or for example, but does Raya have the right to feel aggrieved at not finishing in the top three?
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