Ballon d'Or: how football's biggest individual award works

The Ballon d'Or is the individual prize given to the footballer judged the best over a defined competitive period, created by the French magazine France Football in the mid-1950s. It is decided by a vote of specialist journalists rather than by coaches, players or the public, which is precisely what separates it from most other honours in the sport. Over the decades it has grown from a European curiosity into the trophy that, more than any other, shapes how careers are remembered and ranked by supporters.

The mechanics are straightforward. Organisers publish a shortlist of nominees; each voting journalist then ranks a set number of players in order, and those rankings are converted into weighted points, with first place worth considerably more than the lower positions. The player with the highest total wins. Because the ballot is ordinal rather than a single tick, a candidate who is consistently placed second or third can finish ahead of someone who collects a handful of first-place votes but is ignored elsewhere.

Three official criteria guide the jury: individual performance and decisive impact; team performance and titles won; and class combined with fair play. None carries a fixed mathematical weight, which is why the award is an argument rather than a calculation. In practice, voters have historically rewarded players who dominated a major continental competition or an international tournament, though the balance between individual brilliance and collective silverware shifts from one electorate to the next.

Eligibility has changed twice in ways that matter. Originally the prize was reserved for European players at European clubs. In the mid-1990s it opened to any player at a European club, which allowed George Weah, at Milan, to become the first African winner. A little over a decade later it was opened worldwide. The reference period was also redefined: instead of a calendar year, the award now follows the football season, ending the old distortion in which a summer tournament competed for attention with the following autumn.

The roll of honour reads like a history of the game. Stanley Matthews was the inaugural winner; Lev Yashin remains the only goalkeeper to have lifted it; Johan Cruyff, Michel Platini and Marco van Basten each won it three times. For a long stretch in the twenty-first century the award became the private property of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, with Messi holding the record for most wins, before Luka Modric interrupted the sequence. The prize also expanded into a small family of awards, including a women's Ballon d'Or, a trophy for the best young player and one for the best goalkeeper.

Three misconceptions persist. First, the Ballon d'Or is not a FIFA award: for a handful of seasons around 2010 the two bodies merged their trophies, but they later separated again and now run in parallel. Second, it is not decided by fans, however loud the online campaigns. Third, it is not a lifetime achievement medal, the vote is meant to judge one period of football, not a whole career. Understanding that is the key to reading its results without frustration.