THIS man deserves more than Rafael Nadal to win 2023 Laureus Sportsman of the Year, says King of Clay himself

Rafael Nadal has been nominated for the Laureus Sportsman of the Year award. However, there is someone who deserves it more than Nadal does, believes the “King of Clay” himself.

The 22-time Grand Slam champion, who was named Sportsman of the Year two times so far, said he was honoured to “to be nominated again” for the award. However, he believes that Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) superstar Lionel Messi deserves it more than he does.

While describing his feelings about the FIFA World Cup 2022, Nadal earlier said, while he did not support Argentina in the final, he got teary-eyed when Messi scored the third goal. “The emotion of seeing someone so great achieve what they were missing and someone who had suffered so much to achieve it” was the reason behind his emotion, he said.

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Nadal won the best sportsman award in 2011 and 2021 while he won the Laureus for “Breakthrough” in 2006 and for “Comeback” in 2014. These are various categories of the award. Other categories include Team, Disability, Action, Moment and Sportswoman.

Meanwhile, Leo Messi has reacted to Nada’s recommendation of the Argentine great winning the award this time.

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“For an athlete of your size to say this about me leaves me speechless. Thank you very much….you also deserve everything for the way you compete every time you go out on the court, Messi said. “You're a winner, we still have a lot of competition out there, right? Everyone deserves the Laureus this year!”

Except Nadal and Messi, the other players who have been nominated for the Laureus Sportsman of the Year this time are athlete Armand Duplantis, motorsports racing driver Max Verstappen, basketball player Stephen Curry and Messi’s Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) teammate Kylian Mbappé.

Messi is the only football player to have won the Laureus Sportsman of the Year since 2000, the year it started. In 2020, Leo won it jointly with British race car driver Lewis Hamilton. Laureus has a history of awarding it to tennis players the most number of times, 11 out of 23 times, the award went to a tennis player (Roger Federar (5), Novak Djokovic (4), Nadal (2), five times to a race car driver, four times to an athlete (Usain Bolt) and twice to a golf player (Tiger Woods).