Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez and Lionel Messi will compete for the UEFA Best Player in Europe Award. In theory at least. Despite the three players being officially on the ballet, the reality is that only one player has any chance of winning the award this year.

His name? Lionel Messi.

Here is the rundown for why the Argentine is the front-runner to win the award.

He scored 10 goals in the Champions League this season, tied for the most by any player. Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo also scored 10 goals during the season. Messi won the Champions League, and despite not scoring in that competition, he scored tallies in the Copa del Rey final and clinched the Spanish League title with the game winning goal against Atletico Madrid.

He also scored two big free kick goals in the UEFA Super Cup Final and has four team trophies to his name.

Throw in his 58 goals and 28 assists in 2014-15, and you have a player virtually untouchable across the board.

Ronaldo, who won the award last year after scoring 17 goals in the Champions League and winning the title, scored more goals than Messi (61) and put up a career-best 22 assists. That was the full extent of his season as the Portuguese superstar will walk away with no team trophies in 2015. He did score at a better rate than Messi and put up more hat tricks (he finished the season with three straight hat tricks in three games) and even scored five goals in a game for the first time in his career.

When all is said and done, however, Ronaldo did not win a trophy with Real Madrid. Messi won four.

Luis Suarez's situation mirrors Messi in that he also has four trophies to his name, scored the game winner in the Champions League and also scored in the UEFA Super Cup. However, Suarez's statistics are nowhere near those of his club mate, remarkable as they might be. Suarez finished 2014-15 with 23 goals across the Spanish League and Champions League.

Gianluigi Buffon of Juventus finished fourth while Neymar was fifth in voting. After them Eden Hazard (Chelsea), Andrea Pirlo (Juventus), Arturo Vidal (Juventus), Carlos Tevez (Juventus) and Paul Pogba (Juventus) rounded out the top 10.

Other players that were shortlisted included (in order of voting) Arjen Robben, Manuel Neuer, Carlos Bacca, Andres Iniesta, Alvaro Morata, Thomas Mueller, Kevin De Bruyne, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Gareth Bale, André-Pierre Gignac, Robert Lewandowski, Ivan Rakitić, Jérôme Boateng, Xavi Hernández, Jackson Martínez, Javier Mascherano, Alexis Sánchez, Giorgio Chiellini, Roberto Firmino, Nemanja Matic, Arkadiusz Milik, Nicolás Otamendi, Sergio Ramos, Marc-André ter Stegen and Arda Turan.

Messi won the very first iteration of this award in 2010-11 but has not won it since. During that season he put up 53 goals and 24 assists in 55 games for Barcelona. He won the Champions League and Spanish League title during that season. 

Do you agree that Messi is the undisputed winner of the UEFA Best Player in Europe Award?