Top 10 Best Football(Soccer) Players – 2012

Below is the most updated list about the top 10 best performing soccer players in this year, You will see a lot of new players who have secured there position in the list of top 10 best soccer players in 2012, Please share your comments regarding this list in the comments section.

10 . Didier Drogba

Didier Drogba is an Ivorian footballer who plays in the centre forward position. He currently plays for Chelsea in the Premier League, where he is deputy vice-captain, and is the captain and all-time top scorer of the Côte d’Ivoire national football team. He has scored more goals for Chelsea than any other foreign player and is currently Chelsea’s sixth highest goal scorer of all time. His key attributes include his physical strength, ability in the air, and his power to retain possession of the ball. Drogba moved to Chelsea the following season for a record breaking fee of £24 million, making him the most expensive Ivoirian player in history

9. Iker Casiillas

Iker Casillas Fernández is a Spanish football goalkeeper who captains the La Liga club Real Madrid and the Spanish national team. In 2008 he was on the Spanish team that won their first European Championship in 44 years, the Spanish team that went on to win Spain’s first World Cup (a tournament in which he won the Yashin Award) and the 2012 European Championship.
Casillas has been nominated for the European Footballer of the Year award twice, ranking fourth overall in 2008 and again receiving more votes than any other goalkeeper in 2009.[2] At the end of 2009 he was voted into the UEFA Team of the Year for the third consecutive time. As of 2011 Casillas is one of a very select group of players who have won all major club and national championship titles. In 2010, he was awarded with the Sports Prince of Asturias Award. On 19 October 2010, Casillas became the most capped goalkeeper of all time in the UEFA Champions League and in November 2011, he became the most capped player of all time for the Spanish national team.

8. Wesley Sneijder

Wesley Sneijder is a Dutch footballer playing as an attacking midfielder for Internazionale.He was named UEFA midfielder of the season as well as one of the three best midfielders in the world for 2010 by FIFA. Due to his impeccable placement and confirmed ability to score from free kicks, Sneijder earned the reputation as a dead-ball specialist.With short stature, he is quick, strong on the ball, and his passing range is enhanced by his ambidexterity.

A product of the Ajax Academy, he previously played for AFC Ajax with whom he won six trophies and during which time he was awarded the Johan Cruijff Award (for best young player in Holland) in 2004. He was later sold to Real Madrid for €27 million in 2007, winning La Liga in his first season with the club and later being sold to Internazionale for €15 million.

7. Philipp Lahm

 

German professional footballer who plays for and captains both Bayern Munich and the Germany national team. Lahm is now recognized as one of the best full backs in the world. The right-footed player is able to play on both sides of the pitch, and is now mostly playing as a left-wing-back.

6: Andrea Pirlo

Eyebrows were raised last summer when the veteran midfielder moved to Juventus on a free transfer from AC Milan. The 33 year-old was regarded as a has-been and over-the-hill by many Italian football observers.

However, this season he has been the fulcrum of a Juventus team which has gone on to lift the Serie A title. The Old Lady managed to make history by going throughout the league season undefeated and Pirlo was one of their key players.

5. Xavi

He has been capped 103 times for the Spanish national team, with whom he won UEFA Euro 2008 and the 2010 World Cup. He was named Player of the Tournament by UEFA at UEFA Euro 2008. He was one of the three finalists for the 2010 FIFA Ballon d’Or, alongside Barcelona teammates Messi and Andres Iniesta, he finished third on the vote behind Messi and Iniesta.He narrowly defeated Lionel Messi to win World Soccer’s Player of the year.

On 2 January 2011, in a league match against Levante UD, Xavi made his 549th appearance for the club in all competitions, matching the record held by Migueli. Following this match Xavi is the player with most appearances with Barcelona of all time

4. Wayne Rooney

Aged nine, Rooney joined the youth team of Everton, for whom he made his professional debut in 2002. He spent two seasons at the Merseyside club, before moving to Manchester United for £25.6 million in the 2004 summer transfer window. Since then, with Rooney in the team, United have won the Premier League four times, the 2007–08 UEFA Champions League and two League Cups. He also holds two runner-up medals from both the Premier League and the Champions League. In August of the 2011–12 season Rooney scored his 150th goal, becoming United’s highest goalscorer since the inception of the Premier League.

In 2009–10, Rooney was awarded the PFA Players’ Player of the Year and the FWA Footballer of the Year. Rooney has won the Premier League ‘Goal of the Season’ award by the BBC’sMatch of the Day poll on three occasions. As of 2011, he is the third highest-paid footballer in the world after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, with an annual income of €20.7m (£18m) including sponsorship deals.

5. Andres Iniesta

 

Iniesta played for Spain at Under-16, Under-19 and Under-21 levels, before making his international debut in 2006. He was selected for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, playing one game, as Spain went out in the second round. He helped Spain qualify for Euro 2008, and played an important role in the side as they went on to win the competition, playing every game and being selected in the UEFA Team of the Tournament. Iniesta was selected for the 2010 FIFA World Cup and was a key member of the victorious Spanish side; he scored the winning goal in the final against the Netherlands, also being named Man of the Match, and was selected in the tournament’s All-Star Team. He was also the Man of the Match for two other World Cup games.

2. Cristiano Ronaldo

Ronaldo became the most expensive player in football history after moving from Manchester United to Real Madrid in a transfer deal worth £80 million (€94m, US$132m). In addition, his contract with Real Madrid, in which he was to be paid £11 million per year over the following six years, made him the highest-paid football player in the world at the time, and his buyout clause was valued at €1 billion as per his contract.

On 15 May 2011, Ronaldo became the highest goalscorer in a season in the history of Real Madrid with 51 goals, surpassing the club’s previous high of 49 by Ferenc Puskás. He would later finish the season with a total of 53 goals, making him the first Real Madrid player to ever reach and surpass 50 goals in a season. Six days later, Ronaldo broke the record of most goals ever scored in a season in La Liga with 40, surpassing Telmo Zarra’s mark established in 1951 and Hugo Sanchez’s mark matched in 1990.

 

1. Lionel Messi

 

The Argentinian superstar claimed the Ballon d’Or for the third consecutive year and fully deserved the accolade. Messi scored an incredible 73 goals in all competitions last season, including 50 goals in La Liga and a record 17 in the European Champions.

Messi is now being described by some as the best ever player to grace a football field. His stats are incredible but he still has a lot to prove at international level, he has secured his top position as a best soccer player in 2012 again.

 

 

 

 

Asiago Plateau, Italy

The small town is shrouded in fog in this image taken from the top of a mountain.

Floating Lanterns, Thailand

I had planned a recent trip to Thailand in November to coincide with the Loy Krathong celebration because I had seen pictures of the floating lanterns being launched into the sky. However, nothing I had seen prepared me for the incredible magic of experiencing thousands of these lanterns floating into the night sky at once while monks chanted at the Lanna Meditation Center in Chiang Mai. It was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had.

Infinty Pool, Singapore

The vertiginous “infinity pool” at the Marina Bay Sands resort offers a sweeping view of Singapore, a country that’s achieved success while building up instead of out.

The Most Important Skill to Master

If you’re like me, you are constantly learning new skills — gardening, carpentry, pizza-making, languages, sports, and so on. And I think this is a fun and wonderful thing to do.
But what’s the most important skill?
That’s debatable. I think compassion is a huge one, as is mindfulness. I’d go with those two any day of the week.
But if I had to pick just one, it would be this: learning to be happy with yourself.
That seems too simple, to trite! Too mushy and New-Agey! And I’ll grant all of that, but I stand firmly by my pick.
Why? The answer has to do with how this one thing can affect everything else in your life. If you are not happy with yourself, or your body, you become insecure. You think you’re not good enough. You fear being abandoned and alone. You do lots of other things to compensate, and these lead to problems.
So many of the problems people have stem from this one thing — being unhappy with themselves (often in the form of being unhappy with their bodies). Let’s take a look at why, and then look at some ideas of how to master the skill.
Why It Affects Everything

Let’s say you’re unhappy with your body. You think you are too fat, or too skinny, or your butt is too small (or too big). Or your boobs are too small, or your pecs aren’t big enough. Your stomach is flabby, or loose, or covered in stretch marks. Your thighs are too thick. Your hips are too wide, or too narrow. The list goes on and on.
We’ll get into why we’re unhappy in a minute, but for now, just imagine the unlikely scenario that you’re unhappy with your body. What does that do to you? Well, you might be envious of other people (who, you know, are also unhappy with their bodies). You might be worried that you’re not attractive enough to meet someone, and therefore sabotage your chances for a relationship. If you’re in a relationship, you might think your boyfriend/girlfriend will leave you for someone more attractive. You might then act jealously, and do things out of this jealousy that actually leads to your partner being unhappy, and possibly eventually leaving you.
If you’re unhappy with your body, you might not want to look at it. You might obsessively undereat, and then binge eat, and then feel worse about yourself. You might avoid exercise because you don’t want to even think about the problem. You might eat junk food to comfort your bad feelings, and then make the health problems worse.
You might have anxiety about all of this, about your body, your health, your girlfriend leaving you. Then you eat more to assuage the anxiety, and it gets worse. Or you shop to make yourself feel better, and you get deeply in debt and your life fills with clutter. Or you drink alcohol or numb yourself with drugs or television so you don’t have to think about all this.
At work, you’re unhappy because you aren’t confident about yourself or your body, so you don’t do the things that require confidence and that would further your career. You might not leave your work to find work you’re more passionate about, because you don’t think you’re good enough. Even at the work you’re in, you do what you can to not think about the unhappiness you have, so you procrastinate with social networks, games, and other diversions.
There’s much more that’s possible, but you get the idea. Not everyone has all of these symptoms, but they’re possible for anyone. Many of our problems stems from this one problem, and fixing it can change everything.
That’s why, if you have a finite amount of time to learn (and we all do), investing that time into learning this one skill can pay off in innumerable ways. It’s the most important skill you can master.
Why We’re Like This

If this is so bad, why are we like this? How did it get this way? Well, there’s no one answer. It’s a building up of lots of reasons, including:
Mass media. We see beautiful celebrities with perfect faces, stomachs, thighs, abs, chests and asses all over the place — on the Internet, on TV and movies, in magazines. Everywhere. They’re celebrated as the pinacle of our society, and we all want to be them in some way. They’re not real, of course — they’re Photoshopped, make-upped, did upped in so many ways that what we see is an illusion. We’re comparing ourselves to an illusion. But even if they were, why would we need to be like them? Why can’t we be like ourselves, and let that be the ideal?
Comments from others. Friends, family members, co-workers, even spouses might make a seemingly innocent comment about our butt or boobs that makes us feel bad about ourselves. These comments are small but hit our self-esteem very hard. They’re not really about us, though, even if we almost always take them to heart. They’re about the other person, who is having a bad day, or jealous of you, or projecting their own insecurities on you, or comparing you to the mass media celebrities they idolize for no good reason. See these comments for what they are, and don’t take them to heart.
Childhood incidents. In childhood, perhaps our parents made some comments about us that made us feel bad. Perhaps our parents got a divorce, or our dad was never around — if dad left mom, maybe that meant she wasn’t good enough for him, and by extension maybe I’m not good enough for someone else? If dad left, maybe it’s because I wasn’t good enough for him? This might sound like psychological mumbo-jumbo, but it’s real. I’ve experienced it, and so have countless others. It doesn’t mean we have to let it rule our lives, but we should be aware that it’s there, and learn to deal with it.
Failures. Perhaps we’ve made some mistakes and failed at some things we tried to do. Honestly, everyone does, but when we do it, we take it to heart. It makes us feel bad about ourselves — we’re not disciplined, we’re not good enough. This leads to further failures, further hurting our self-image.
Health problems. While having thick thighs or a bit of flab on the tummy is nothing to feel bad about — love how you look! — a completely separate problem from how we feel about our bodies is the health of our bodies. We tend to mix them together — being fat makes us feel bad about ourselves, for example — but really they can be separated. We can feel good about our bodies but realize that being overweight can lead to heart disease and diabetes down the road, so it only makes sense to lose some weight. Not because we want to look like a celebrity and feel better about ourselves, but because we want to be healthy. Being healthy, by the way, can help your self-image, and even though I said they can be separated, this is one positive benefit from conflating the two that you should accept happily.
Spiral of negative thoughts. One bad thought leads to another, and then another, until we have a bundle of bad thoughts that become our self-image. This negative self-image can affect everything we do. But this self-image and these bad thoughts are not us — they are things that happen within us, but we don’t have to let them become us. We can cope with them, and turn them into positive thoughts, into gratitude, into happiness.
These are just a few reasons. In fact, so many things affect our self-image that it’s impossible to list them all, but it’s good to start to be aware of them, so we can cope with them.
How to Master the Skill

Let’s say you’ve accepted my premise that learning to be happy with yourself (let’s call it “love thyself”) is the most important skill to master … how do you get started?
The simple answer is practice. The complicated answer is that it takes awhile, because our self-image wasn’t formed overnight and it won’t be changed overnight. That’s OK. Just focus on this moment, and you’ll learn as you go.
I can’t give you a complete guide to learning to love thyself, as that would take a book, and I’m still learning myself, but here are some tips for starting out:
Become aware of your mental movie. You have a movie (perhaps a series of them) that you play inside your head about yourself. Usually we aren’t aware of this, but it happens, throughout the day. The movie is about who we are: you have a flabby stomach, you are fat, you are too skinny, you aren’t disciplined, you aren’t lovable, your braces look weird, you aren’t good at anything. Start to pay attention when this movie plays — it affects everything you do. Realize that this movie isn’t you — it’s just playing in your head. Realize that it isn’t true, and isn’t based on reality. Realize that it can be changed.
Start to make a new movie. This new movie will replace that play-out old one that keeps running in your theater. It will be a Michael Bay production, with a gorgeous lead actor (hey, that’s you!), great visual effects, lots of excitement … except with more character development and a lot smaller budget. Let’s base this movie on reality, not fears from childhood or illusions of celebrities or comments from others. Instead, it should be based on the fact that you are a good person, wonderful even, who is loving, kind, beautiful, passionate. This might not be what you think about yourself, but let’s make the movie like this anyway. Ask other people why you’re lovable (people who are likely to give a kind answer). Use these images in your new movie. When negative images start coming up (my boobs are too small!), cut them out and tell them they have no place in your production. Put better images in.
Consciously play the new movie. Learn to recognize the flicker of the old movie starting, and shut it off. Put the new movie in the projector instead, and play it. Practice this like it’s your new religion. You will get better with constant practice. Put up reminders all around you so you don’t forget.
Learn mental judo. There will be things coming in all around you that will try to attack your new movie. Comments from friends, celebrities, things you see on Facebook. When they are hurtling towards you, learn to lean to one side and let them whiz by. Give them a small shove, with a thought like, “That comment is not about me, it’s about you.” (And then go give your friend a hug — she’s probably having a bad day.) Or a thought like, “That celebrity probably is also worried about her body — having big boobs or a flat stomach doesn’t solve that problem.” Give the celebrity a mental hug, then play your new movie.
You are already perfect — you just need to realize it. You don’t need anything to solve this problem — you already have it. You just need to practice, like it’s the most important thing in your life, because in many ways, it is.
‘You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.’ ~Buddha

Baby Macaque

A baby macaque with its mother close at hand

Resting Lions, Tanzania

special moment!!!!

Be Inspired

You are overcome with laziness and procrastination, feeling unmotivated, stuck, can’t get started.
You are not alone. This is a commonality in the human condition, and the solution is elusive, never standing still and not wanting to be easily caught.
You are not alone, but in this union with your brothers and sisters, there is hope. I’m among you, and I have found a few meager solutions. And if I can solve this problem, so can you. If others have beaten it, you can.
These are ways I’ve found inspiration.
one: This morning as I sat down to write I had some ideas for posts but wasn’t excited about any of them. So I asked on Twitter, “What are you having problems with that I can help with?” Several people responded with things like laziness, motivation, procrastination, getting started. Having something to help with inspired me to write.
lesson: Inspiration can come from finding a way to help others.
two: My eight-year-old son was looking bored, and I asked about a (short) novel he’s been reading. He showed me the book and I challenged him to read four chapters today. His face lit up and he got to reading.
lesson: Creating a challenge can be an inspiration.
three: I have problems with procrastination, just like anyone else. I usually solve it when 1) I crystalize in my mind what I most want to be doing right now and what is most important; 2) I clear away all other distractions; and 3) I get started. As I began writing this post, I closed all other browser tabs (bookmarked ones I want to read later) and opened only the “new post” page in WordPress. Then I clicked on the “fullscreen” button so that everything but the writing box disappeared. Then I entered “Presentation Mode” in Google Chrome, so that everything else on my computer screen faded away. Now it’s just me and these words.
lesson: Clear away everything else and just create.
four: In the morning I sometimes feel lazy when I’ve told myself I want to exercise, stretch, or meditate. I don’t feel motivated. So instead of motivating myself to do something that might take 10, 20 or 30 minutes, I just focus on the smallest action: starting. To meditate or stretch, I just need to put my butt on the pillow (on the floor). To exercise, I just need to lace up my shoes and get out the door. Once I start, the rest is easy, and I’m always glad I did.
lesson: Get your butt on the pillow. Don’t wait for motivation, just start. Motivation will come.
five: As I began to write this morning I heard what sounded like opera music streaming through the walls from my neighbor’s house. What a lovely sound to write to! I immediately began playing some opera of my own, and the uplifting beauty infused my act of creation.
lesson: Surround yourself by inspiration. Music, art, great books, fascinating people.
six: When I feel lazy and don’t want to do anything, I remind myself of the gift I’ve been given. I live an amazing life, and to be given the joy of this world and the people around me, is a complete and utter miracle. Then I ask myself, “Is this how I want to use this miracle?” What a complete waste of something so perfect, so profound, to spend the little time I have in this life on pointlessness and laziness. I don’t mind doing nothing, if it is a nothing that makes me happy. But I also want to create, to help people, to be compassionate towards others, to do something fulfilling and joyous. And so I do.
lesson: Be grateful for the miracle of your life, and ask yourself how you want to spend it. Then get to creating, to making lives better.
seven: I read blogs by fascinating people doing inspired things. Often they will write about something they’re working on, and it sparks an idea in me, makes me want to do something really cool too. Yesterday this happened and I’ve spent hours now dreaming up something big. It might never happen, but that’s not the important thing. Because I surround myself (virtually) with inspired people, I’m more likely to be hit by inspiration.
lesson: Don’t wait for inspiration to strike — you have to meet it halfway. If you want to be hit by lightning, go out in a thunderstorm with a metal rod. Scream at the thundering gods, daring them to strike you.

Yokohama , Japan.

Yokohama glitters at night from the observation deck of Landmark Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Japan

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

It’s winter in Brazil, but that clearly hasn’t stopped crowds from flocking to the beach at Ipanema