{"id":2033,"date":"2011-01-11T11:49:17","date_gmt":"2011-01-11T19:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.generalknowledgetoday.com\/?p=2033"},"modified":"2011-01-11T11:49:17","modified_gmt":"2011-01-11T19:49:17","slug":"lionel-messi-winner-of-the-fifa-ballon-dor-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/?p=2033","title":{"rendered":"Lionel Messi Winner of the FIFA Ballon d&#8217;Or award"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Barcelona&#8217;s Argentine forward<strong> Lionel Messi was Monday named winner of the FIFA Ballon d&#8217;Or award<\/strong>. The newly named award resulted from the merger of the <strong>FIFA World Player<\/strong> and the Ballon d&#8217;Or awards, both of which Messi won last year.<\/p>\n<p>Messi, 23, who made history by becoming the first Argentine player to win the award in 2009, beat off Barcelona team-mates Xavi and Andres Iniesta in the voting. The announcement of Messi&#8217;s win was made by Pep Guardiola, his coach at Barcelona.<\/p>\n<p>His voice breaking with emotion, Messi said: &#8220;This is special for me and I&#8217;d like to share this award with my team-mates, with all the people that have helped me and with all of the Argentine people.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Barcelona&#8217;s Argentine forward Lionel Messi was Monday named winner of the FIFA Ballon d&#8217;Or award. The newly named award resulted from the merger of the FIFA World Player and the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/?p=2033\" class=\"more-link\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,125,190],"tags":[1367,4870,207,7257,7258,409,27,1532,317,318,329,829,4596,4968,7259,7260,7261],"class_list":["post-2033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-affairs-club","category-current-affairs-today","category-sports-today-in-the-news","tag-answers","tag-barcelona","tag-current-affairs","tag-fifa-ballon-dor-award","tag-fifa-world-player","tag-general-knowledge","tag-gk","tag-gk-questions","tag-gk-quiz","tag-gk-today","tag-lionel-messi","tag-quiz","tag-soccer","tag-soccer-quiz","tag-the-fifa-ballon-dor-award","tag-winner-of-the-fifa-ballon-dor-award","tag-world-footballer-award","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generalknowledgetoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}