Ask a casual fan how the Ballon d'Or gets decided and you'll usually hear some version of "a big global vote" or "whoever scores the most." Neither is close. It's a 30-name shortlist, a points ladder, and a jury restricted to one journalist per country — and the rulebook that decides who even gets a ballot changed as recently as 2022. If you're going to argue about who got snubbed, it helps to know the actual machine doing the deciding.
Step one: thirty names, not a global poll
The process doesn't start with fans or even with the full voting panel. A group of journalists from France Football and L'Équipe, working alongside a small panel that has included Ballon d'Or ambassador Didier Drogba, draws up a shortlist of 30 men's finalists and 30 women's finalists each year based on the prior season's performances. Nobody outside that room votes on who makes the list. Everything that follows — every ballot, every ranking, every argument on social media in December — happens inside that pre-selected group of 30. A magnificent season by a player who doesn't crack the shortlist simply isn't eligible, no matter how good the underlying case is.
Step two: one ballot per country, and fewer countries than before
Once the shortlist exists, France Football hands out ballots to accredited journalists around the world — but not as many as it used to. Through 2021, the magazine tried to make the award feel genuinely global by finding a voting journalist in more than 180 countries. Starting with the 2022 award, that pool was cut down to the top 100 nations in the FIFA men's world ranking (and the top 50 in the women's ranking), one media member per country. The stated reason was quality control — a smaller, more football-literate panel — but the practical effect is that a chunk of the planet's press corps no longer gets a say at all.
Step three: fifteen points for first, one for tenth
Here's the part most fans get wrong even when they've watched the gala every year. A voter today doesn't just name a winner, or even a top five — they rank their top ten names from the 30-player shortlist. The points scale for those ten spots is 15, 12, 10, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1, from first choice down to tenth. Every ballot from every eligible country gets tallied on that scale, and the totals decide the final order; ties are broken by counting how many first-place votes each player collected, then second-place votes, and so on down the list. Spreading the scoring across ten names rather than three or five is itself a deliberate design choice — it makes it harder for a single dominant player to run up an enormous margin purely because rivals split a small number of top spots, though it doesn't eliminate that dynamic entirely.
This wasn't always the system
It's worth being explicit that the mechanics above describe the award as it has worked since 2022 — because the Ballon d'Or has been rebuilt more than once, and comparing eras without knowing that is where a lot of bad arguments start. From 2010 to 2015, France Football merged with FIFA to create the FIFA Ballon d'Or, voted on by an entirely different electorate: national-team coaches and captains alongside journalists, more than 500 voters in some years, each naming just three players worth five, three, and one point. That's the system that produced some of the sport's most debated results — Xavi and Andrés Iniesta taking turns finishing behind Lionel Messi at Barcelona for three years running, or Wesley Sneijder winning a continental treble with Inter Milan and still finishing fourth, behind three players from that same rival club. The award reverted to a journalists-only Ballon d'Or in 2016, still ranking just three names per ballot; from 2017 each journalist ranked five, worth six, four, three, two and one points, until the 2022 reform expanded it to the ten-name, 30-player-shortlist system in place today. Four different voting machines in under two decades — which is exactly why an "all-time" Ballon d'Or ranking is measuring different things depending on the year.
What actually changed in 2022
The voting pool wasn't the only reform. France Football also rewrote what the award is supposed to measure. Before 2022, judges weighed a full calendar year and could factor in a player's broader career stature — reputation, past trophies, the sense that someone was simply "due." From 2022 onward, the criteria narrowed to three things, judged strictly within the European season (August to July, not January to December): individual performance in that window, the player's team success over the same period, and personal conduct and fair play on the pitch. A player who was brilliant from January to May but quiet the following autumn is now scored on a completely different calendar than the one most fans are picturing when they debate a given year.
Why the wiring matters more than the winner
None of this is trivia for its own sake. It explains real outcomes: why the same kind of season can finish fourth in one era and second in another, why a shortlist snub ends a case before it starts under today's rules, and why comparing a 2013 result to a 2024 result under "the same award" is a little like comparing two different competitions that happen to share a trophy. The Ballon d'Or isn't rigged, but it also isn't the simple popularity contest it gets treated as. It's a shortlist committee, an electorate that has been redrawn three times, and — right now — a fifteen-to-one, top-ten scoreboard. Once you see the scaffolding, the history of who won and who didn't reads very differently.
Tiempo extra
If the mechanics of who gets ranked and why has you thinking about the players who got closest without ever lifting the trophy, that's a companion piece for another day. In the meantime, you can test your own read on a career the way the voters do — piece by piece — in today's Daily Play riddle.