Xavi Hernandez beat Messi and Wesley Sneijder to the title of 2010 World Player of the Year (World Soccer Magazine )
Tom Adam writing on Soccernet says …
“Across the breadth of 2010, on only 24 occasions did an individual player exceed 100 completed passes in one game. Xavi, who played nearly 90 times, was responsible for 12 of those landmarks. In the World Cup, he attempted a tournament-high 669 passes, with 544 finding their target – another record. Given the pre-eminence of both Spain and Barcelona in football culture at present, it is a certainty that in years to come, the term that denotes their shared style, tiki-taka, will become every bit as familiar an entry in the football lexicon as Brazil’s joga bonito, or Netherlands’ Total Football. Xavi, undeniably, inescapably, is the amplifier through which that phrase booms across the football landscape at present, and will echo through the sport’s history.”
Apart from that the Spanish national team won the title of World Team of the Year – beating runner’s up Inter Milan.
Mourinho was Coach of the Year.