Lionel Messi, Gianluigi Donnarumma fail to win Ligue 1 Season Awards

While PSG players Kylian Mbappe and Nuno Mendes had an eventfully sucessful Sunday evening getting crowned as the Best Player and Best Youngster of the season respectively, Lionel Messi and Gianluigi Donnarumma failed at winning any individual trophy in the categories they were nominated for.

Donnarumma could have won the award for the Best Goalkeeper of the Ligue 1 season for 2022/23, but he failed to do so among those in a field featuring Brice Samba (RC Lens), Anthony Lopes (OL), Pau Lopez (OM), and Lucas Chevalier (LOSC).

The goalkeeper of Lens, Samba, earned the award with a league-leading 15 clean sheets through 37 games played and one more yet to be played next weekend.

It's Samba's first award as the best GK of Ligue 1, and with it, he broke the possibility of PSG goalies winning the award on back-to-back triumphs by Donnarumma as he won it already last season following fellow-Parisian Keylor Navas' victory in the 2021 season.

Lionel Messi, who scored the title-clinching goal for PSG on Saturday at Strasbourg, had to conform with watching teammate and face-of-PSG Kylian Mbappe lift the Best Player of the Season award trumping him in the voting process.

Both world champions could not win the trophy as that would have meant a shared accolade, although it's fair to say that the most-deserving player ended up getting named MVP of Ligue 1 for the 2022/23 season.

Messi will now play one more time at the Parc des Princes, enjoy the cheers and the jeers raining from the stands, and then cross the back door of the venue on his way out of it and Paris entirely as he will move on to other endeavors.

The Argentina international might have won two leagues in as many seasons spent in France, but one thing he couldn't do was getting crowned the best player of the league in any of his two campaigns playing Ligue 1 football... because of a certain Kylian Mbappe.