Lamine Yamal, Barcelona Femení, Emma Hayes, USMNT and Trinity Rodman are some of the players and teams included in ESPN’s end-of-year awards. ESPN Illustration
  • Luis Miguel Echegaray, ESPNDec 26, 2024, 09:31 AM ET

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Welcome to the end-of-year awards! From best players and best teams in the men’s and women’s game to the best celebration of the year, I’ll reveal my winners from 2024.

A reminder that these awards take only the calendar year into consideration. So even though last season plays a factor, these awards mainly pay tribute to performances and achievements over this calendar year.

Now let’s begin.

Men’s player of the year: Vinícius Júnior, (Real Madrid and Brazil)

This was a tough call because in the first half of the year, Rodri‘s impact for club and country was gargantuan, hence his Ballon d’Or win and why I voted for him as my 2023-24 Premier League player of the season. There’s an argument to make that even in his absence because of an ACL tear, his impact remains. Just look at Man City’s recent struggles.

But I can’t give this annual award to someone who hasn’t played since September. I have to include the entire year and throughout it, I consider individual consistency. It has to be Vinícius: the ultimate big-game player. Jude Bellingham, a Euros finalist, came close but the England midfielder’s contributions to Real Madrid came early in the 2023-24 season. Lautaro Martínez also deserves a major mention. But it has to be Vini.

In last season’s Champions League — especially in the latter stages — he led his club to glory. No player in the tournament produced more goals or assists in the knockout stages, including a goal in the final. In LaLiga, he missed the early parts of the 2023-24 season due to injury but once he came back, he was on fire. Twenty goal involvements in less than 1,900 league minutes (per Opta) which is wild when you consider he missed a massive chunk of the season.

This campaign? We have already seen a 30-minute hat-trick against Borussia Dortmund, ridiculous solo goals against Osasuna and Villarreal and 13 goal contributions in the league. In total, he has five trophies in the calendar year, including the recently won Intercontinental Cup over Pachuca, when he scored and assisted the opener for Kylian Mbappé.

Overall, he has 32 goals and 14 assists for Real Madrid in 2024. Yes, Brazil’s failure at Copa America and issues in qualifiers are the only dents, but that’s not a Vinícius problem. That’s a national one, where the team is going through a transition. Yet, he still managed to score twice in the Copa América and remains a major protagonist in every game. This has been his most successful calendar year, and at only 24 years old, there’s a lot more to come.