Every year it produces the same ritual: a shortlist, a month of arguments, a ceremony, and a week of people explaining why the wrong player won. The Ballon d'Or has no competition attached to it and settles nothing on the pitch, which is precisely why it is impossible to ignore.
The award was created in 1956 by the French magazine France Football, with the journalist Gabriel Hanot among those behind it - the same man who had pushed Europe into creating a club competition for champions a year earlier. The idea was simple: a panel of European football journalists would vote for the best player of the year, and the winner would receive a golden ball.
A European prize, strictly
The first winner was Stanley Matthews of England, who was forty-one years old. For its first four decades the rules restricted the vote to players holding European nationality, which had a consequence the award has never entirely lived down: Pele and Diego Maradona, the two players most often named as the greatest of the twentieth century, were never eligible to win it during their careers.
The restriction was loosened in 1995, when players of any nationality playing for a European club became eligible. The first winner under the new rule was George Weah of Liberia, which remains the only time a player from an African nation has won. In 2007 the rules opened fully, allowing players anywhere in the world to be considered.
Who votes, and why that matters
The voters are journalists, which shapes everything about the result. Journalists watch certain leagues more than others, are influenced by what happened most recently, and tend to reward goals and trophies over the less visible work of defenders and holding midfielders. It is why the list of winners is dominated by forwards and attacking midfielders, and why a defender winning it is treated as an event.
For a period between 2010 and 2015 the award was merged with FIFA's own player of the year prize, and during those years national team captains and coaches voted alongside the press. The two were separated again afterwards, leaving football with two annual best-player awards that frequently disagree.
It is an opinion poll with a trophy attached - and no amount of criticism has ever made anybody want it less.
The era of two
For roughly a decade the award effectively became a two-man contest between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who between them collected it year after year while everyone else was reduced to arguing about third place. It made the ceremony predictable and the debate ferocious in equal measure, and it produced a strange side effect: outstanding seasons by other players were remembered mainly as the ones that failed to break the run.
The run was eventually broken by Luka Modric, a central midfielder who had won the Champions League and reached a World Cup final in the same year. His victory was treated as a correction rather than a surprise, which says a good deal about how narrow the award's focus had become. Rarer still is a win by an actual defender: Fabio Cannavaro managed it after captaining Italy to the 2006 World Cup, and such wins remain so unusual that they are cited as evidence every time somebody argues the voting is biased towards goalscorers.
Because the award was limited to European players for its first forty years, Pele never won it during his career. France Football later addressed this by giving him an honorary Ballon d'Or, decades after he had retired.
The women's award
A women's Ballon d'Or was introduced in 2018, with the Norwegian forward Ada Hegerberg the first winner. Its creation followed years of pressure and arrived alongside a broader expansion of the ceremony, which now also recognises goalkeepers and young players.
The women's prize carries the same problems as the men's, in sharper form: the voters see some leagues far more than others, and a player at a club that is rarely televised abroad starts at a disadvantage no amount of goals can fully overcome.
The ones who never won it
The list of players who finished a great career without a Ballon d'Or is more interesting than the list of winners. Paolo Maldini, who spent twenty-five years as one of the best defenders in the world, never won it. Nor did Xavi Hernandez or Andres Iniesta, whose peak years happened to coincide exactly with the two-man era. Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, both of whom dominated leagues for years, also finished without one.
Some of that is bad timing. Some of it is the award's long-standing preference for players whose contribution shows up in a highlights package. A defender who prevents goals has no equivalent of a tap-in, and the voters, watching mostly on television, see what the cameras follow.
Why the arguments never end
There is no agreed definition of what the award is for. Is it the best player, the most valuable player, the player who had the best season, or the player whose team won the most? Different voters answer differently, sometimes within the same ballot, and the result is a compromise that satisfies nobody completely.
Attempts to fix this - changing the voting period to match the season rather than the calendar year, publishing individual ballots, adding criteria - have reduced some of the noise without touching the underlying problem. Football is a team sport being measured by an individual prize.
And yet players keep the trophy where visitors will see it, clubs put the winners on the front of their season tickets, and supporters who insist the whole thing is meaningless can still name every recent winner in order. The argument is the product. It has been working for seventy years.
