Everyone that voted for Arsenal midfielder to win The Best FIFA Men’s Player 2023 –

After a quite sensational calendar year, Declan Rice found himself on the list of 12 finalists up for 2023’s The Best FIFA Men’s Player award alongside superstars of the game.

During the relevant voting period – 19 December 2022 to 20 August 2023 inclusive – Rice famously became the first West Ham United captain since Bobby Moore to lift a European trophy when the Hammers won the second ever Europa Conference League. He then became the most expensive British player of all time with a £105m transfer to Arsenal in July and had started excellently.

Whether that made him a contender to be named the best male player in the world is up for debate – although he certainly achieved more than actual winner Lionel Messi, who was somehow still riding the wave of his 2022 World Cup win even though it happened outside of the aforementioned dates and he literally won last year’s FIFA gong for that exact reason.

Rice actually finished 12th out of 12 in the final standings for the FIFA award, with the votes cast for him equating to just one point in the end – Messi and Erling Haaland tied on 48.

2023 The Best FIFA Men’s Player – standings

The Best FIFA Men’s Player is awarded on the basis of votes cast by a national team captain, coach and media representative for every member association in the world, with each person choosing a top three and the various players assigned points accordingly.

In total, there were eight votes for Rice in the top three. One, Montserrat captain Lyle Taylor – who plays his club football in League One for Cambridge United – decided that Rice was the best male player in the world in 2023 and put him first ahead of Messi and Haaland. The EFL journeyman was born in Greenwich, east London, and it stands to reason that he’s a West Ham fan.

But Taylor wasn’t the only person to name Rice. Bhutan journalist Namgay Zam put him second, while coaches for Mongolia and Chinese Taipei, as well as the media representatives for Austria, Fiji, Turks & Caicos Islands and Uruguay, a random collection of nations if ever there was one, ranked him third.

Votes for Declan Rice – 2023 The Best FIFA Men’s Player