Inside the Ballon d'Or: Who Votes, What They Judge, and How It's Decided

Football's biggest personal award is not chosen by fans, players, or coaches. It is chosen by 100 journalists, one from each of the top 100 countries in the FIFA world rankings, and each of them picks ten players from a list of thirty and puts them in order.

The award belongs to France Football, a French magazine that started it in 1956, and the first winner was Stanley Matthews of England.

Since 2024, France Football has run the award together with UEFA, but the magazine still owns it and still runs the voting. If there is ever an argument about the result, the magazine's own editor has the final say.

The 2026 award is the 70th edition, and the ceremony is in London on 26 October, the first time it has been held in England. UEFA says London was chosen as a tribute to Matthews, seventy years after he won the first one.

One big rule has changed that many fans still get wrong. A player's past career no longer counts for anything, and only the last season does.

Here is how the whole thing works, from the moment the shortlist is drawn up to the moment the points are counted.

How the voting actually works

Before anyone votes, someone has to decide which thirty players can be voted for. Four groups work on that list together: the writers at France Football, the writers at L'Équipe, at least one journalist who voted the year before, and UEFA ambassadors.

For the 2026 men's award, those ambassadors are Luís Figo and Fabio Capello, while Nadine Kessler helps pick the women's list.

Only one season counts, and the official rules set it precisely: 3 August 2025 to 19 July 2026, with the World Cup and AFCON both falling inside that window.

Nothing outside those dates counts at all. If a player scores a hat-trick this September, those goals do not help him win the 2026 award, because voters are only looking at the season that has already finished.

For the 2026 award, the list of thirty players came out on 8 September, and that date matters twice over.

It matters again because the countries that get a vote are decided by the FIFA world rankings on that same day. The top 100 countries vote for the men's award and the top 50 for the women's, which works out at 100 journalists and 50 journalists, one person per country, with no country getting two votes.

That system only started in 2022, and before then the men's jury was much larger, with 170 journalists voting rather than 100.

Each journalist picks ten players from the thirty and puts them in order, first to tenth, and those places are worth points. First place is worth 15, then 12, 10, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. Add up every journalist's votes, and the player with the most points wins.

Notice the jump between first and second. It is 15 against 12, a gap of three, while every other gap further down is two points or less. So a journalist who really believes in one player carries extra weight with that first choice.

There is also a rule for a tie, though it almost never gets used. Article 8 of the official rules says that if two players finish level on points, the one with more first-place votes wins, and if they are still level it goes to second-place votes, then third, and so on.

If that somehow does not settle it, Article 9 hands the decision to the editor of France Football. There is no appeals panel and no outside judge.

What voters judge, and the rule that changed it

The official rules tell journalists to look at three things, and the order they are listed in is part of the rule itself.

First comes how the player performed on their own, and whether they made a real difference in big moments. Second is how their team did and what they won. Third is how the player behaved, their respect and their fair play on the pitch.

That order matters more than people think. Winning the Champions League helps a player's case, but it sits second, not first.

Here is the part most people miss. There is no formula at all, and goals, assists and trophies are not fed into a calculation that produces a score.

No rule says the Champions League is worth more than the World Cup, or that goals beat titles. The rules simply give journalists three things to weigh, each one decides for themselves how to weigh them, and the only maths happens afterwards, when the rankings are turned into points.

The biggest change to these rules came in 2022, and it came directly out of an argument about the year before. In 2021, Lionel Messi won the award ahead of Robert Lewandowski, who had broken the Bundesliga goalscoring record the season before.

Under the rules at that time, a player's whole career was one of the things voters were told to consider, and the result was heavily criticised.

A few months later, France Football changed the rules. A player's past career was removed from the criteria, the number of voters was cut from 170 to 100, and judging moved from the calendar year to the football season.

So a long and brilliant career no longer counts for anything on its own. What a player did inside that one fixed season is the only thing voters are told to judge.

What that means for this year

This year is harder to call than usual, partly because of that rule change. Messi would have had a strong case for a record ninth award if Argentina had won the World Cup again, but Spain beat them 1-0 in the final in New Jersey.

Rodri won the Ballon d'Or in 2024, and was then named the best player of the 2026 World Cup. Under rules that put personal performance first, that gives him a real claim. The list of thirty also includes Lamine Yamal, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham.

The bigger point is that the Ballon d'Or is not a trophy-counting exercise, and it never produces a score you can check. It is a ranking, made by 100 journalists, each applying three rules in their own way to one fixed season, and that is why it gets argued about every single year.

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