Tonight, Lionel Messi is fancied to win the Ballon d’Or, which will be the eighth time the Argentinian has walked off with the award, while fellow World Cup winner Aitana Bonmati is favourite take the Ballon d’Or Feminin.
It’s the highest individual honour that a footballer can receive, and while the physical manifestation of it — a quite literal golden, 18-carat, 22cm football that weighs around 12 kilos — is impressive enough, the real prize is the kudos and glory that comes with it.
Why is it so prestigious? How do to win it? Who decides who wins it? When did the people behind it discover that women play football too? Do players care? And what is the plural of Ballon d’Or?
We invite you to find out all of this, and possibly more, by reading on…
What is the Ballon d’Or?
The Ballon d’Or is an annual award given to the best men’s and women’s footballers in the world. Basically, it’s world football’s MVP award.
Alexia Putellas receiving the award last year (Photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)Whose bright idea was it?
The first Ballon d’Or was awarded in 1956, and back then was widely known simply as the European Footballer Of The Year award. It was the brainchild of Gabriel Hanot and Jacques Ferran, two journalists from France Football magazine.
Hanot was a pretty extraordinary character: he was a player, manager and journalist, and at one point he was effectively the head coach of the French national team at the same time as being editor of the sports newspaper L’Equipe. After one particularly embarrassing defeat, the paper called for those who ran French football and the national team to be replaced… meaning he basically called for himself to be fired.
Beyond that, he played a key role in introducing professionalism to French football in the early 1930s, and was the man who persuaded UEFA that the European Cup, now the Champions League, would be a good idea.
It took 62 years for France Football to introduce the Ballon d’Or Feminin — until 2018.
Who is eligible?
These days, it’s any footballer in the world.
But that hasn’t always been the case. When the award first started it was open only to European players. Then in 1995 it was expanded to include anyone playing in European football, and that year George Weah became the first non-European to win it.
Weah receiving the award (Photo: Claudio Villa/Grazia Neri via Getty Images)
Then, finally, in 2007 it was expanded to include any footballer playing in any country around the world, although in practice that hasn’t made much difference. Nobody playing even part of the year outside Europe has ever finished in the top three. Neymar came fifth in 2011 having played some of that year for Santos in Brazil (although he moved to Barcelona halfway through it).
The only men to ever even make the 30-player shortlist while playing the entirety of the qualification period outside Europe are Iraq and Al-Gharafa’s Younis Mahmoud and Club America’s Mexican goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa, who finished 29th and joint 30th respectively in 2007. This will obviously change if Messi does strut back off to Inter Miami with the orb.
As an exercise to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the award in 2016, France Football’s editorial board ‘reimagined’ all of the pre-1995 awards to take into account non-European players. In this re-evaluation, Pele was awarded seven theoretical Ballons, Diego Maradona two, and Garrincha, Mario Kempes and Romario one each.
The Ballon d’Or Feminin has been a little more geographically spread: three of the four winners were based in Europe, but Megan Rapinoe won in 2019 when Alex Morgan finished third, while Sam Kerr, Marta, Christine Sinclair and Trinity Rodman have all placed highly while playing in the USA.
GO DEEPER
Ballon d’Or shortlist: Messi, Haaland, Bonmati and Smith among nominees
Who decides who wins?
Journalists, in short. I know. You wouldn’t trust journalists to decide which colour pants to put on in the morning, never mind who the best player in the world is, but this is a solemn duty that has been passed down the generations.
For the men’s award one journalist from each of the top 100 countries in the world, as decided by the FIFA rankings, is chosen as their respective nation’s representative. For the women’s award it’s one from each of the top 50. These jurors are given a shortlist of 30 players, from which they must pick a top five, awarding six, four, three, two and one points to their respective choices. The player with the most points wins the award.
If you were wondering why they have missed out five points, it’s to add extra weight to the top choice, to mitigate against an unsatisfactory situation where second place votes could decide the winner.
That shortlist of 30 names is settled upon by a panel that features the editorial staff of France Football and L’Equipe, any of the previous year’s jurors whose choices tallied exactly with the eventual top three, and ‘Ballon d’Or ambassador’ Didier Drogba.
Didier Drogba and Kylian Mbappe at the 2019 ceremony (Photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
In previous years, the players were judged over a calendar year, but in 2022 that was tweaked slightly to cover what was essentially a European season: from the previous August to July. That is basically why Messi is favourite this year, because that period takes in the World Cup.
Has this process changed over the years?
It has! I’m glad you asked.
For the first 50-odd years the process was relatively similar to how it is now, with journalists voting on the winner, but in 2007 they decided to let the professionals in, with coaches and captains of the world’s national teams given votes.
That continued for the period when the Ballon d’Or was merged with the FIFA World Player of the Year (more on that shortly), but when that award struck back out on its own in 2016, it reverted to just journalists.
There also used to be a much wider pool of jurors: one each from any country that fancied it, basically. But after Messi won in 2021 there followed significant debate about whether voting had simply become a popularity contest, rather than a considered assessment of who was actually the best footballer in the world.
Thus, they made some frankly quite sniffy changes, limiting votes to those from the top 100 men’s and 50 women’s countries, the theory being to ensure only nations with ‘an established football culture’ and access to widespread coverage of world football could vote. There is an element of logic to it, but it as the rankings currently stand it excludes six countries that have qualified for the men’s World Cup and besides, they do have TV and the internet in, say, Cyprus or Thailand or Kenya.
Lionel Messi leaves the ceremony after winning the 2021 award (Photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)What’s the thing about the awards merging?
FIFA introduced their own awards for the best men’s and women’s players in the world in 1991 and 2001 respectively, the trouble being that frequently (12 out of 19 times) the winners would be the same as the Ballon d’Or anyway.
So in 2010 the men’s awards were merged to create the FIFA Ballon d’Or, although it should be noted that our Ballon chums still didn’t recognise female players, with the FIFA Women’s Player of the Year continuing independently until 2016.
However, the experiment only lasted six years, the awards consciously uncoupled, and FIFA relaunched their own bauble, which in a moment of profound silliness they named The Best FIFA Men’s Player. Reports that a five-year-old came up with that name are currently unconfirmed.
Who has won it?
Messi, for the most part.
The pint-sized Argentinean genius currently has seven to his name, which is more than every Brazilian to ever win it combined. Next on the list is Cristiano Ronaldo, who has five: his first came in 2008 while at Manchester United, and for 10 years the eternal rivals shared the thing between them, until Luka Modric broke the stranglehold in 2018. Messi then won the next two, in 2019 and 2021, with 2020 somewhat controversially cancelled (due to the Covid pandemic — according to France Football, ‘all the conditions’ could not be met) when the expectation was that Robert Lewandowski would be victorious.
Michel Platini, Marco van Basten and Johan Cruyff all won it three times, while the other multiple champs are Franz Beckenbauer, Alfredo Di Stefano, Kevin Keegan, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Ronaldo (Brazilian version), each with two.
Kevin Keegan, our 1978 Ballon d’Or! 😍#ballondor pic.twitter.com/lxwDDassnE
— Ballon d’Or #ballondor (@ballondor) July 4, 2023
All in all players from 20 different nations have taken home the men’s prize. France, Germany and Italy have the most different winners (five), while four Englishmen have taken it: Keegan, Michael Owen, Bobby Charlton and Stanley Matthews, the inaugural winner in 1956.
The club with the most winners is Real Madrid (eight), Barcelona have five players other than Messi, Manchester United have four different winners while Matthews picking up that first award means Blackpool, currently in England’s League One, are a slightly incongruous name on the list. As perhaps are Dukla Prague, for whom Josef Masopust was playing in his successful year of 1962. Assuming Messi does win this year, he will be the first man to win it while playing for three different clubs.
The run down of the Ballon d’Or Feminin winners won’t take as long, given there has only been four of them. Ada Hegerberg, the Norwegian Lyon forward, took the first in 2018, edging out the then Wolfsburg midfielder Pernille Harder. Rapinoe, fresh from her third World Cup win, beat England full-back Lucy Bronze in a 2019 landslide (230 votes to 94), while Barcelona’s brilliant Alexia Putellas came out on top in the last two editions.
What do you need to do to win it?
The official criteria, as laid out by France Football, directs the jurors to consider three factors: individual performances and decisive and impressive character; collective performances and honours; class and fair play.
Beyond that, being a striker helps.
Of the 66 men’s Ballons d’Or issued to date, 44 have been to forwards. It’s a figure slightly skewed by Messi and Ronaldo, but even without them it’s the glory boys with the goals that, understandably, tend to get the most love from the votes.
Of the rest, 17 have gone to midfielders, 14 of which were basically wingers or No 10s, and none of the other three — Lothar Matthaus, Luka Modric and Masopust — could really be described as water carriers. Four have gone to defenders — Beckenbauer has two, Fabio Cannavaro and Matthias Sammer one each — and just one to a goalkeeper, Lev Yashin, way back in 1963.
Ada Hegerberg with the trophy in 2018 (Photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
Performances in big international tournaments will do your cause plenty of good. In 1962, for example, Masopust was part of the Czechoslovakia team that got to the World Cup final, where they lost to Brazil. Cannavaro and Sammer won the 2006 World Cup and the 1996 European Championships in the respective years they were successful.
Zinedine Zidane’s first — and, perhaps surprisingly only — Ballon d’Or came in the year he scored twice to win the World Cup final. Luka Modric won after taking Croatia nearly all the way in 2018. This even applies to Messi: his success in 2021 was broadly attributed to Argentina’s Copa America victory, and likewise it will have been his exploits in Qatar, rather than Miami, that carry him to his latest — if he gets it.
Do they have any other awards?
Indeed they do.
The Yashin Trophy is, perhaps keeping in mind that goalies never win the big one, given annually to that year’s best keeper. Bafflingly, but along the same lines, in 2021 they introduced the Gerd Muller Trophy, awarded to the year’s top striker (based purely on number of goals, for club and country), because those guys don’t get enough glory anyway.
In 2022 the first Socrates award was issued, to Sadio Mane, for humanitarian work.
The Kopa Trophy was introduced in 2018 to honour the year’s best young (under 21) player, chosen by a panel of former Ballon d’Or winners. Kylian Mbappe, Matthijs de Ligt, Pedri and Gavi have been the recipients so far.
Ronaldo presented Gavi with the Kopa Trophy last year (Photo: Aurelien Meunier via Getty Images)
There have also been a few one-off awards. In 1999 they convened all former Ballon d’Or winners to vote (semi-successfully; a few couldn’t be bothered) on the ‘Player of the Century’ which — get this — was won by Pele. They also awarded him the ‘FIFA Ballon d’Or Prix d’Honneur’ (which does have a whiff of the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence) in 2014, just for yucks.
In 1989 they awarded the ‘Super Ballon d’Or’ to Di Stefano, having decreed that he was the best of the multiple winners (at the time), then in 1995 truly tipped into the realms of the absurd by dreaming up something to give Maradona which — and we promise we’re not making this up — was called, by some at least, the Golden Ballon d’Or.
Do the players actually care about it?
Emphatically, yes.
“Cristiano Ronaldo has only one ambition, and that is to retire with more Ballons d’Or than Messi,” France Football’s editor-in-chief Pascal Ferre told the New York Times in 2021. “And I know that because he has told me.”
What’s the plural?
It’s Ballons d’Or. Not Ballon d’Ors.
And that pretty much covers it.
(Top photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)