Euro 2016 - Phew! Dimitri Payet not named player of the tournament after all

UEFA appeared to confer the title on the West Ham forward on Monday, a seemingly baffling choice as Payet - while superb in the first two games - had thereafter been hugely overshadowed by team-mate Antoine Griezmann.

It turned out, however, that UEFA did actually intend to give the big award to Griezmann, despite trumpeting Payet as the winner of their 'player barometer' award.

The timing was all very strange, however: the UEFA announcement about Payet was bundled in with news of Renato Sanches being named young player and Griezmann getting the golden boot... with no initial mention of Payet.

That was later changed. It's almost as if people high up at UEFA have no problem with making things up as they go along, and changing the rules to suit themselves and make themselves look good. Which, of course, can't possibly be the case.

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Dimitri Payet won Player of the Tournament, Renato Sanches the Young Player award, and Antoine Griezmann took the Golden Boot at Euro 2016. And one of those choices left Alex Netherton rather baffled.

Football is not, as you might imagine, a game about goals. Oh no. It is, in fact, a game of opinions.

As such, this game serves the human instinct to rank anything and everything. Similarly, it serves perfectly the modern human habit of taking huge umbrage at people with different opinions to you. In the aftermath of the Chilcot Inquiry, Brexit, and possible collapse of the European banking system, disagreement was reaching unprecedented levels.

Thankfully, UEFA have stepped in with decisive action. Instead of allowing people to argue over who was the best player in the Euro 2016 tournament, they have used boffins to build the UEFA Player Barometer.

This is how UEFA describe it:

“The UEFA EURO 2016 Player Barometer tracks players' form in the build-up to and during the tournament. The Barometer runs official player statistics through a specially designed algorithm to create rankings based on player performances.”

And with the tournament finished, the Barometer has worked out who the best players at Euro 2016 were, with some surprising inclusions.

The most surprising of which is that two good performances in the group stage has somehow been enough to land the Player of the Tournament accolade for Dimitri Payet.

1. Dimitri Payet

2. Antoine Griezmann

3. Gareth Bale

4. Toni Kroos

5. Kevin De Bruyne

6. Eden Hazard

7. Cristiano Ronaldo

8. Mesut Ozil

9. Paul Pogba

10. Raphael Guerreiro

Renato Sanches secured a move to Bayern Munich ahead of the Euro 2016 tournament, and the German side may think that they got a bargain. Sanches emerged as one of Portugal’s most important central midfielder, and he could continue in that role for club and country for at least another decade.

Sanches faced competition from Kingsley Coman and Raphael Guerreiro but was chosen by UEFA technical observers, including Ioan Lupescu, Alex Ferguson and Alain Giresse.

Antoine Griezmann scored the most goals in the tournament, with six. Cristiano Ronaldo, Olivier Giroud, Dimitri Payet and Gareth Bale all managed three goals of their own.

Eden Hazard and Aaron Ramsey set up the most goals with four assists each.