The Ballon d’Or remains the most closely watched individual prize in association football: a golden ball awarded each year to the player judged the best over the preceding season. Presented by the French magazine France Football since December 1956, it has outlasted rival honours, brief mergers and repeated rule changes while keeping its editorial core. As of July 2026 the current men’s holder is Paris Saint-Germain and France forward Ousmane Dembélé, winner of the 69th edition in September 2025 for the 2024–25 campaign. Argentina’s Lionel Messi still leads the all-time list with eight awards; Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo follows with five.

The trophy’s authority rests less on a single governing body than on continuity. Conceived by sports writers Gabriel Hanot and Jacques Ferran, it began as a European journalists’ choice and grew into a global prize without abandoning its press jury. UEFA has co-organised the annual gala with Groupe Amaury, owner of France Football and L’Équipe, since 2024, but France Football retains the brand and the independent voting system. A women’s Ballon d’Or, introduced in 2018, runs on parallel lines. Understanding the award today means tracing that history, reading the modern ballot carefully, and separating it from FIFA’s own prize, The Best FIFA Men’s Player.

From Europe Outward

The first Ballon d’Or went to England’s Stanley Matthews of Blackpool, then 41, after a vote among European football writers. For decades the prize was effectively the European Footballer of the Year award: only players of European nationality were eligible. That European focus shaped early legends — Alfredo Di Stéfano, Raymond Kopa, Eusébio, Johan Cruyff — and limited the field even when South American stars dominated European club football. The geography of the vote later widened; the principle of journalist election stayed.

Eligibility shifted in stages. In 1995 France Football opened the award to players of any nationality active at European clubs, and Liberia’s George Weah became the first non-European winner. In 2007 the prize became fully global: any professional footballer could be considered. Between 2010 and 2015 France Football and FIFA merged their flagship player awards into the FIFA Ballon d’Or, combining the older Ballon d’Or with the FIFA World Player of the Year (itself created in 1991). That partnership ended after 2015. From 2016 France Football restored a standalone Ballon d’Or, while FIFA launched The Best FIFA Men’s Player as a separate ceremony.

Later reforms tightened the calendar rather than the brand. No Ballon d’Or was awarded in 2020 because of the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2022 France Football abandoned the calendar year and aligned the award with a football season, typically running from the late summer into the following summer, so that club campaigns and summer tournaments sit in one coherent window. The 2022 prize, won by Karim Benzema, was the first decided on that seasonal basis. Those structural changes sit behind the process used for recent winners Rodri (2024) and Dembélé (2025).

How Voting Works

Today’s men’s Ballon d’Or is decided by specialised football journalists, not by coaches, captains or fans. One journalist is invited from each of the top 100 countries in the latest FIFA men’s rankings at the time the process opens. France Football and L’Équipe first publish a shortlist of 30 nominees. Each juror then ranks ten players from that list in order of preference. Points are allocated on a fixed scale: 15 for first place, then 12, 10, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 for tenth. The player with the highest aggregate is the winner; ties are broken by counting first-place votes, then second-place votes, and so on. For the women’s award the same method is used with a smaller jury drawn from the top 50 ranked nations.

Voters are instructed to apply three published criteria: individual performances with a decisive and impressive character; team performances and achievements; and class and fair play. Since the 2022 reform, those judgements cover the previous season rather than January to December. The World Cup in Qatar in late 2022, for example, fell into the 2022–23 window that fed Messi’s eighth win in 2023. The next men’s ceremony is scheduled for later in 2026, covering the season just finished, under the same seasonal logic.

The shortlist remains an editorial filter. Players outside the published 30 cannot accumulate points, so early-season narrative and club form matter long before ballots close. Critics still call the prize a popularity contest or attack-minded bias, yet the formal design is narrower than in the FIFA Ballon d’Or years, when national-team captains and coaches shared the vote with the media. Since 2016 the Ballon d’Or has returned to a pure press jury, now capped by FIFA ranking rather than opened to every association.

Against The Best

Confusion between the Ballon d’Or and The Best FIFA Men’s Player is common because both claim to crown the world’s outstanding male player and both sometimes name the same winner. They are separate institutions. The Ballon d’Or is owned and administered by France Football; The Best sits inside FIFA’s annual awards show. From 2010 to 2015 the two lineages were fused as the FIFA Ballon d’Or. Since the 2016 split they have run in parallel, occasionally diverging in outcome and regularly diverging in method.

FIFA’s voting architecture is deliberately plural. For The Best, ballots come from four constituencies: national-team coaches, national-team captains, selected media representatives, and a public fan vote online. Each group carries equal weight — 25 per cent of the total. Voters typically rank three names in a category, with points of five, three and one. That blend of dressing-room, press and popular opinion is the clearest structural contrast with France Football’s journalist-only top-ten ranking. Dembélé added The Best FIFA Men’s Player to his 2025 Ballon d’Or, illustrating how the two can still align when a single seasonal narrative dominates.

Timing and framing also differ. The Ballon d’Or has, since 2022, been a season prize with a shortlist and a fixed points ladder. The Best remains FIFA’s global showcase, with coaches and goalkeepers among the categories and fan participation built into the headline player award. Prestige still tilts, for many supporters and clubs, toward the older golden ball, but The Best is the official FIFA individual ranking and publishes detailed vote breakdowns by coach, captain and media. Readers comparing the two should treat them as cousins, not duplicates.

Records And Arguments

The statistical hierarchy is clear. Messi’s eight Ballons d’Or (2009–2012, 2015, 2019, 2021, 2023) are the record; he is also the only winner to collect the prize with three clubs and the only man to win it while playing outside Europe. Ronaldo’s five (2008, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017) sit second, and he holds the record for nominations. Johan Cruyff, Michel Platini and Marco van Basten each won three times. Lev Yashin of the Soviet Union remains the sole goalkeeper winner, in 1963. Franz Beckenbauer is the only defender to have won twice. Matthews is still the oldest winner; Brazil’s Ronaldo, in 1997, remains the youngest at 21 years and 96 days.

Controversy is part of the award’s modern soundtrack. In 2010 Wesley Sneijder, central to Inter Milan’s treble and the Netherlands’ run to the World Cup final, finished outside the podium while Messi took the FIFA Ballon d’Or; Inter’s then president publicly called the outcome unfair. In 2013 Franck Ribéry, spearhead of Bayern Munich’s treble season, finished behind Ronaldo and later described the process as a political choice after voting deadlines were extended. The 2020 cancellation left Robert Lewandowski without a formal chance after a season many observers thought he would have won. In 2024 Rodri edged Vinícius Júnior; Real Madrid’s reported pre-ceremony boycott kept the debate alive into the following year.

Those disputes rarely rewrite the rulebook, but they explain why France Football keeps publishing criteria, shortlists and points systems in public. The Ballon d’Or does not claim laboratory objectivity. It claims a durable editorial method: a season’s worth of performances, ranked by a ranked press jury, under three stated tests. Seventy years after Matthews lifted the first golden ball, that method — refined, globalised, and again uncoupled from FIFA’s own show — is still how football’s most famous individual honour is decided.