Aston Villa star Emiliano Martínez won FIFA’s The Best Goalkeeper award on Monday.
The Argentina international won the same award in 2022 and made history by become the first stopper to win it twice.
Martínez was instrumental in helping Aston Villa qualify for the Champions League for the first time in over four decades and won the Copa América with the national team in the summer. He also won the Golden Glove in the same tournament.
Back in October, the Aston Villa player won the Yashin Trophy [award for the best stopper of the year] for the second time, a feat not achieved by anyone else before.
Olé in Argentina have contacted the World Cup winner’s long-time agent, Gustavo Goñi, to get his views on his client’s latest individual honour.
Martínez spent a decade at Arsenal before joining the Villans in 2020 and spent most part of his time at the Emirates at other clubs on loan. The South American played regularly at Aston Villa, which helped him make debut for Argentina in 2021.
Since then, he’s been a regular for his national team and won the World Cup and Copa América. Martínez’s representative was confident he would succeed and explains what individual awards mean to him.
“We spoke before the awards ceremony and also afterwards. He was clearly very excited. One more achievement in his career, he fought hard for it. Last year we had already experienced the award ceremony live together. Also, the France Football award. This one was from a distance, but we shared it with the same joy and emotion,” he said.
“We worked together since he was a boy, and I always trusted that he would succeed. You were already writing about him in Olé, I was convinced that he was going to do well and so was he.
“He gets very excited with everything that happens, with these awards, with what he experiences every time he goes to Argentina, to his city of Mar del Plata.”