Lost in all the hullabaloo of CSN's launch merging with MLS Cup Week to create a perfect storm of local footy news is the fact that on Monday Atiba Hutchinson received the Danish Superliga Player of the Year award for 2010.
A freaking Canadian won the player of the year award of an entire European league. For soccer!
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
To say this is unprecedented would be like saying Seinfeld was a popular television show. Or that water is wet.
Sure, there have been other Canadian men's soccer players who have been standouts for European clubs. Some of them even played for Canada.
But while Julian de Guzman's Player of the Season accolade at Deportivo La Coruna a couple of years back was certainly a sterling achievement, Hutchinson did him one better by winning that award at both his old club FC København and the league FCK competes in.
The closest comparison would be Alex Bunbury's reign as the Portuguese League's Foreign Player of the Year in the mid-90's. Even then, Bunbury's honour came with the caveat of being limited to "only" foreign players in that league.
Hutchinson's does not.
This should be a huge story in the Canadian sports media, and Atiba Hutchinson should have already been a household name as the best player in the nation, and even more so now. But of course, this being Canada, it took a Voyageurs message board thread and a link to a Chinese news site over at BC Soccer Web to bring this story any sort of attention in Hutchinson's homeland.
Sad (and hardly shocking), but true.
You can check out a clip of Hutchinson receiving his award at the Danish Football Awards Show here.