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. France Football publishes a shortlist of 30 nominees; each juror then ranks ten of them in order, and those rankings are converted into points, with first place worth 15 and tenth place worth 1. 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.

Who votes and what each place is worth

The jury is made up of specialist journalists, one per country. Under Article 5 of the 2026 regulations, the men's award is voted on by representatives of the top 100 nations in the FIFA rankings, and the women's award by those of the top 50. The rankings are taken as they stand on the day the shortlists are published. The list of 30 nominees does not come from the jury: under Article 6 it is drawn up by France Football's editorial staff, with L'Équipe journalists, at least one juror from the previous edition and UEFA ambassadors.

The Article 7 scale adds up to 67 points per ballot. With 100 ballots for the men's award, a player's ceiling is 1,500 points, the total for being first on every one; for the women's award, with 50 ballots, it is 750. Under Article 8 a tie is settled by the number of first places, then second places, and so on, and under Article 9 any dispute over the vote goes to France Football's editor-in-chief.

The three official criteria

Three official criteria guide the jury, in this order of importance under Article 4 of the regulations: 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.

Criteria that are not the same for everyone

The Ballon d'Or, the goalkeeper trophy and the young player trophy follow the same three criteria, in the same order of importance: inside the same ceremony, it would be odd to grade nominees by a different ruler. The Club of the Year breaks that pattern and runs on a different set, with no fixed hierarchy between the items: quality of play, titles won, memorable wins, results beyond expectations, respect and fair play. The Coach of the Year inherits those five items and adds leadership, tactical skill, the ability to get the most out of the squad available, to bring through a young player and to beat reasonable objectives: the longest list in the whole ceremony. The Sócrates Award closes the account by dropping any sporting criterion at all, judging only the social reach of the initiative.

Eligibility has changed twice in ways that matter. Originally the prize was reserved for European players at European clubs. In 1995 it opened to any player at a European club, which allowed George Weah, at Milan, to become the first African winner. In 2007 it went global, whatever the club. The reference period was also redefined in 2022: instead of a calendar year, the award now follows the football season, from August to July.

The period that counted in 2026

Article 3 of the 2026 regulations set the window from 3 August 2025 to 19 July 2026. For the men, that includes the World Cup and the Africa Cup of Nations; for the women, the Asian Cup and the Women's Nations League finals. The Women's Africa Cup of Nations, which ended on 16 August 2026, counts towards the next edition. The ceremony for the 70th men's and eighth women's Ballon d'Or was set for 26 October 2026 in London. It is not the first ceremony held outside France: the 2010 to 2015 editions took place in Zurich.

The year no trophy was awarded

In 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic cancelled the entire ceremony, the only gap in the award's history between 1956 and 2026: neither the Ballon d'Or nor any of the parallel trophies were given out that year. The relaunch, the following year, arrived with a fuller calendar, not a leaner one: the Club of the Year debuted for men in 2021, gained a women's version in 2023, and the Coach of the Year, now carrying the Cruyff name, only joined the calendar in 2024.

The roll of honour

The roll of honour reads like a history of the game. Stanley Matthews was the inaugural winner; Lev Yashin, in 1963, became the first goalkeeper to win it and, as of the 2025 edition, was still the only one; Johan Cruyff, Michel Platini and Marco van Basten each won it three times. For a long stretch in the twenty-first century the award was the private property of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, until Luka Modric broke their run in 2018. With eight wins up to the 2025 edition, Messi holds the record.

The categories at the ceremony

Besides the two Ballons d'Or, the 2026 ceremony has eight more shortlists, published on 8 September. The men's and women's Striker of the Year trophies and the Sócrates Award, given to a player for solidarity work or social causes, are presented without a shortlist.

The names behind each trophy

Picture a trunk with branches: the Ballon d'Or is only the trunk of the ceremony, and every other trophy handed out the same night carries the name of a reference point in football, nearly always a former Ballon d'Or winner himself. Raymond Kopa won in 1958, the first Frenchman to lift it, and now lends his name to the prize for the best under-21. Gerd Müller won in 1970, with Bayern Munich, and lent his name to the striker's trophy in 2022, a year after the prize was born under another label. Johan Cruyff became shorthand for the coach's prize, and Lev Yashin, the goalkeeper already mentioned here as the only one to win the main Ballon d'Or, lends his name to the prize for the best goalkeeper.

The Sócrates Award is the only one with no direct sporting backing. It honours Brazilian midfielder Sócrates and was born in 2022, in partnership with his family and the Monaco-based organisation Peace and Sport. Raí, Sócrates's youngest brother, sits on the panel that picks the winner, alongside representatives of France Football and Peace and Sport itself. There is no counting of goals or titles here: the criterion is the initiative's social impact, and the prize has already gone to both players and an institution.

How the vote works in each category

The same panel of journalists that decides the Ballon d'Or also votes for the goalkeeper trophy: jurors name three goalkeepers from a list of ten, worth 5, 3 and 1 points. The Club of the Year uses the same type of juror, but with an even shorter ballot, two clubs from a list of five, worth 2 and 1 points. There, when the number of first-place mentions fails to break a tie, the next criterion is a curious one: it counts how many players from each club, before the summer transfer window, appeared on the Ballon d'Or lists.

No juror decides the Gerd Müller Trophy: no ballot, no shortlist, just goals scored for club and country over the season, added up in a single tally. Whoever finds the net most often takes the trophy, with no room for an armchair debate.

The young player trophy breaks from the journalists' pattern: the voters are not the press but the Ballon d'Or's own former winners, each naming three players from a list of ten, worth the same points as the goalkeeper trophy. On the women's side, the panel gathers former winners of the women's Ballon d'Or, the players who have finished on its podium since its creation in 2018, and an editor-in-chief of France Football, with each juror naming two players from a list of five, worth 2 and 1 points. Ties are also broken differently between the sexes: for the men, by the following positions, as in the Ballon d'Or; for the women, if the tie survives the count of first-place mentions, it is France Football's editorial staff that decides.

Three misconceptions persist. First, the Ballon d'Or is not a FIFA award: from 2010 to 2015 the two awards were merged, with the ceremony in Zurich, but they later separated again. 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.