Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappe replace Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi as best in the world, Rodri better than Erling Haaland but there’s also forgotten Arsenal man bossing things

The year is 2030, Lionel Messi is retired on a beach somewhere, and he’s still winning awards as the world’s greatest player.

That was the feeling at the 2024 Best FIFA Football Awards in London when the Inter Miami star took home the main prize.

The award, for the best player in the world in 2023, saw many of the voters take Messi’s 2022 World Cup heroics into account.

That’s ignoring the fact he was knocked out of the Champions League and Coupe de France at the last 16 stage, only won Ligue 1 by a point from Lens, and then was injured for much of Inter Miami’s disastrous MLS campaign where they finished 27th out of 30 teams.

Here at talkSPORT, we do things a little differently. And our ranking of the world’s best players is based on who’s the best right now, at the start of 2024.

It’s certainly understandable why there’s still so much love for Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — two of the greatest to ever play the game — but what’s there to learn from living in the past?

Instead, football’s entering a new era, and 2024 looks set to finally be the year we move on from nostalgia about the Barcelona and Real Madrid legends battling it out in El Clasico six years ago.

Primed to take that mantle are Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappe, who have long been pencilled in as football’s new attacking rivalry.

However, they’ve been shown recently that despite their ridiculous scoring, it’s not going to be as simple as that.

The new generation of megastars looks set to be far less predictable.

Here, talkSPORT looks at the best players in football right now.

It’s easy to be distracted by Girona’s title charge, but Athletic Bilbao sitting third in LaLiga would otherwise be the story of the season in Europe.

After years of closing the gap before