Former Manchester City of England sensation, Yaya Toure has conceded that the third award he won as African Footballer of The Year should have gone to Super Eagles’ erstwhile captain, John Mikel Obi.
Sports247 gathered that Toure, who went on to clinch the award for an unprecedented four straight years, is of a view that winning the UEFA Champions League with Chelsea of England in 2012 should have given Mikel the nod in ending that year as Africa’s best player.
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Incidentally, Mikel also won the English FA Cup that same year with Chelsea, but he was not even considered for the podium alongside Yaya Toure, as second place went to his clubmate at The Blues, Didier Drogba, and third was Rigobert Song of Cameroon.
Yaya, though, has now cast his mind back to 13 years ago and conceded that Mikel should have been number one at the APOY award ceremony, which was held for the fourth time in Accra, Ghana.
Yaya declared, “To be honest, he deserved it. Obi deserved it, truly. That year, he won the Champions League and he was instrumental for his team in that period. I was not even thinking of it and I thought I would just go and give light to the ceremony, because I had won it twice.
I did not put the ceremony on my mind and, during the Ballon d’Or, I was thinking in my head who was going to win the African ceremony.”
The former Olympiakos of Greece and Barcelona of Spain battler added that a chain of coincidences had also seen Samuel Eto’O, also later a four-time winner, get the African award because he won the UCL with Inter Milan of Italy, which, therefore, made Mikel’s case unusual.
“I remembered how Eto’O won the Champions League, and they gave him the African award. So, I did not think much about the ceremony. I felt that I would just go there and lose, fine. That’s why I was upset a bit and, in that sense, I think Mikel Obi deserved it,” Yaya concluded
