At the beginning of a new decade, Telegraph Sport is auditing all major sports - our 2020 vision - with new sports each day. Rugby, athletics, cricket and tennis have come and gone. Still to come: men's football, Formula One, netball, boxing, golf, cycling, and horse racing.

Starpower

In 2019, Megan Rapinoe became the standout superstar of women’s football. Even now, five months on from the World Cup, there remains the feeling that few athletes, in any sport, could have done what she did over the summer. Rapinoe’s World Cup winner’s medal, golden boot and golden ball for the player of the tournament capped off a summer in which the 34-year-old had dominated and shaped the discourse from day one, a master orator capable of shifting the focus of press conferences to gay rights, prisoners’ rights and equal pay, all the while beating off her feud with Donald Trump with an insouciant shrug of her shoulders.

Rapinoe’s Ballon d’Or win was deserved for this alone, but it also highlighted how few players enjoy her profile, even among supposedly ardent followers of women’s football. The best player in the Women’s Super League, Dutch striker Vivienne Miedema, was overlooked by 29 of the 43 judges for the Women’s Ballon d’Or. She is currently the top scorer in the WSL and the Champions League, with 26 goals and 10 assists from 16 starts. When Miedema won the PFA Women’s Player of the Year in April, many people within football and in the room that night admitted to me that they had not heard of her. Wolfsburg’s Pernille Harder and Lyon’s Ada Hegerberg deserve to feel aggrieved that they also received so few votes.