For an award that dominates conversation every autumn, the Ballon d’Or is decided by a process that is surprisingly precise. It is not a popularity poll of fans, nor a decree handed down by a governing body. It is a weighted ballot cast by a defined pool of specialist journalists, tallied with a fixed points scale, and governed by written regulations that France Football has revised repeatedly since the trophy was created in 1956. Understanding those rules is the difference between arguing about who should win and understanding how a winner actually emerges.
France Football, the magazine that belongs to the same publishing group as the French sports daily L’Équipe, owns and organises the award. It sets the criteria, assembles the voting panel, compiles the shortlist and counts the votes. What follows is how each of those pieces fits together under the rules in force today.
Who votes
The men’s Ballon d’Or is decided by an international jury of specialist journalists, one per country, drawn from the nations ranked highest in the FIFA World Ranking. Under the current regulations that panel is capped at 100 countries, so the men’s award is settled by 100 voters. The women’s Ballon d’Or Feminin uses the same model on a smaller scale, with a jury drawn from the top 50 nations.
This is a meaningful change from the recent past. Between 2007 and 2021 the men’s jury had swelled to around 170 countries, a size critics felt diluted expertise and invited quirky, hard-to-explain votes from federations with limited exposure to elite European and South American football. Trimming the panel to the top 100 nations was a deliberate move to concentrate the vote among journalists most likely to watch the candidates week in, week out. Every voter is meant to be a recognised football specialist from their national media, not a fan or an administrator.
The shortlist and the ballot
Voters do not start from a blank page. Before the ballot opens, France Football publishes a shortlist of 30 nominees for the men’s prize. That list is compiled by the France Football editorial staff together with colleagues from L’Équipe, input from previous jurors, and consultation with the award’s ambassadors, who in recent editions have included former greats attached to the ceremony.
Each juror then selects ten players from that shortlist of 30 and ranks them in descending order of merit, from their first choice down to their tenth. Crucially, they cannot simply vote for one player. The requirement to rank a full top ten forces voters to make fine distinctions between the second, fifth and ninth best campaigns of the season, and it is those lower placements that frequently decide close contests.
How the points are counted
Each ranked position carries a fixed number of points. A first-place vote is worth far more than a tenth-place mention, but the scale is not linear, which is part of what makes the count interesting.
Rank on a ballotPoints awarded
1st15
2nd12
3rd10
4th8
5th7
6th5
7th4
8th3
9th2
10th1
The points from all ballots are added together, and the player with the highest total wins. Because a single first-place vote is worth 15 points while a tenth-place vote is worth just 1, the top of each ballot dominates the arithmetic. Yet a candidate who is ranked highly on almost every ballot, even without topping many, can still out-poll a more divisive rival who collects a handful of first places but is left off other voters’ lists entirely. That tension between breadth of support and depth of support is the mathematical heart of the contest.
If two players finish level on points, the tie is broken by the number of first-place mentions each received. Should they still be level, the count moves to second-place mentions, then third, and so on down the ballot until the tie resolves.
The three criteria voters are asked to weigh
The rules do not leave voters to define greatness however they like. France Football sets out three criteria, listed in order of importance:
First, individual performances, judged on their decisive and impressive character. Second, collective performances and titles won with club and country. Third, class and fair play, a nod to conduct on and off the pitch. The ordering matters: individual brilliance is the primary yardstick, team success is a strong secondary factor, and sporting behaviour serves as a tie-breaking sensibility rather than a headline measure.
The 2022 reform: a season, not a calendar year
The single biggest change to the modern Ballon d’Or arrived in 2022, when France Football overhauled the reference period. For decades the award assessed a player’s calendar year, from January to December. That never sat comfortably with the rhythm of the sport, which is organised around a season that straddles two years. A brilliant spring could be split awkwardly across two separate ballots, and voters casting their choices in the autumn were effectively judging performances that were nearly a year old alongside recent ones.
The 2022 reform did more than move the goalposts on timing. It also removed a criterion that had long been part of the calculus: a player’s overall career and body of work. Under the current rules, voters are asked to judge the season in front of them, not a candidate’s legacy. That was a pointed correction to years in which established icons were felt by some to benefit from reputation as much as recent form. Together with the reduction of the jury to the top 100 nations, these changes were designed to make the award more transparent, more current and easier to defend.
The wider ceremony: it is not just one trophy
The Ballon d’Or is now the centrepiece of an evening that hands out several distinct prizes, and not all of them are voted on the same way. The Ballon d’Or Feminin recognises the best women’s player, decided by its own jury of journalists from the top 50 nations. The Kopa Trophy, for the best young player, is unusual: it is voted for not by journalists but by a jury of former Ballon d’Or winners, giving the sport’s past champions a say in anointing its emerging ones. The Yashin Trophy honours the best goalkeeper and is decided by the journalist panel from a dedicated shortlist. Other honours presented at the gala have included a prize for the leading goalscorer, a club-of-the-year award and the Socrates Award for humanitarian and social engagement, with a coaching prize added to the roster more recently.
A short history of the format
The award was conceived in 1956 by the France Football journalist Gabriel Hanot, and its first recipient was the England winger Stanley Matthews. For most of its early life it was strictly the European Footballer of the Year, open only to players from European nations. The eligibility rules widened in stages: in 1995 the award opened to non-European players at European clubs, and in 2007 it became a truly global prize open to players anywhere in the world. Between 2010 and 2015 it merged with FIFA’s own award to form the FIFA Ballon d’Or, before France Football reclaimed sole ownership of the trophy from 2016. Each of those shifts changed the pool of eligible players; the 2022 reforms changed how they are judged.
The takeaway
Strip away the glamour of the ceremony and the Ballon d’Or is a structured, rules-based election: a curated field of 30, a panel of 100 national experts, ten ranked slots per ballot and a weighted points scale that rewards consistency of esteem as much as raw star power. The 2022 reforms tightened the focus onto a single season judged on its merits, which is why modern debates tend to hinge on a few months of decisive form rather than a candidate’s long-term standing. Knowing the mechanics will not settle who deserves to win, but it does explain how, year after year, a diverse spread of opinions is compressed into one name.
