Lionel Messi’s Ballon d’Or Records: Every Win Explained

No individual prize in football is scrutinized like the Ballon d’Or, and no player has bent it to his career the way Lionel Messi has. Between 2009 and 2023 the Argentine collected eight of them, a total no one else has approached. Cristiano Ronaldo, his defining rival, finished on five. To understand how Messi got to eight is to walk through fifteen years of changing voters, changing rules, and a shifting definition of what the award was even measuring.
This is a win-by-win account, checked against the published France Football and FIFA voting results. The story is not a simple straight line: the trophy changed its name and its electorate midway through, some of Messi’s wins were landslides and others were decided by a handful of points, and at least two arrived amid genuine debate.

The award Messi kept redefining
Context matters here, because the prize itself was not constant. From its founding in 1956 through 2009 the Ballon d’Or was France Football’s award, decided by a jury of journalists. From 2010 to 2015 it merged with the FIFA World Player of the Year to become the FIFA Ballon d’Or, and the electorate expanded to include national team captains and coaches alongside journalists. In 2016 the partnership dissolved and France Football took the trophy back, returning to a journalist-only vote. Messi won under all three arrangements, which is part of what makes his haul so difficult to dismiss as an artifact of one particular voting system.

2009: the first, and a landslide
Messi’s first Ballon d’Or came off the back of Barcelona’s 2009 sextuple year, and it was not close. He collected 473 of a possible 480 points, beating Ronaldo by a margin that stood as the largest in the award’s history at the time. He was the first Argentine to win it. This was also the last edition before the FIFA merger, so it remains, in the strictest sense, a pure France Football trophy. The scale of the result set the tone: at twenty-two, Messi had not squeaked past the field, he had buried it.
2010 to 2012: the FIFA Ballon d’Or hat-trick
The three seasons under the new FIFA-branded format produced Messi’s most sustained stretch of dominance and, in 2010, one of his more contested wins. That year he took 22.65% of the vote ahead of Barcelona teammates Andres Iniesta (17.36%) and Xavi (16.48%). The debate was less about Messi’s quality than about the World Cup: many expected a winner from the Spain side that had just lifted the trophy, or from the beaten finalists. An all-Barcelona podium in a World Cup year raised eyebrows, and it still colors how that particular edition is remembered.
There was no such ambiguity in 2011. Messi claimed 47.88% of the vote, comfortably his most dominant winning share in the FIFA years, ahead of Ronaldo (21.60%) and Xavi (9.23%). Then came 2012, the year that turned a run into history. He won again with 41.60% ahead of Ronaldo (23.68%) and Iniesta (10.91%), becoming the first player ever to win the Ballon d’Or four times, and four in a row at that. It arrived in the same calendar year he scored 91 goals, a total that remains a benchmark for a single year.
4consecutive wins (2009-2012), a first in the award's history
2015: the treble reasserts the case
After Ronaldo won in 2013 and 2014, the trophy returned to Messi in 2015, powered by Barcelona’s second continental treble. He took 41.33% of the vote, well clear of Ronaldo (27.76%) and a young Neymar (7.86%). This was the last edition of the FIFA-branded award before the two bodies split, and it gave Messi a fifth title, drawing him level with the pace of an era that increasingly looked like a two-man contest.
2019: seven points, the narrowest of his wins
The 2019 award, back under France Football’s sole control, is the one that could most easily have gone the other way. Messi finished on 686 points to Virgil van Dijk’s 679, a gap of just seven. France Football itself described it as one of the closest results in the prize’s history. The detail is instructive: van Dijk was actually named first on more ballots (69 to Messi’s 61), but Messi’s consistent presence in second, third, fourth and fifth positions across the 176 voting journalists carried him over the line. Ronaldo finished third on 476 points, with Sadio Mane fourth on 347. It was Messi’s sixth, moving him one clear of Ronaldo for the first time.

2021: Copa America, and a real debate
Messi’s seventh win, in 2021, is his most argued-over. He finished on 613 points ahead of Robert Lewandowski (580) and Jorginho (460). Lewandowski’s supporters had a strong case built on a record-shattering domestic scoring season, and France Football later acknowledged the closeness of the field. Messi’s decisive credential was international: he had finally won a major trophy with Argentina, the 2021 Copa America, ending a long personal wait for silverware in the national shirt. For many voters, that breakthrough was the tiebreaker in a year without a clear statistical runaway.

2023: the World Cup completes the set
The eighth and, to date, final Ballon d’Or was the most fitting. Messi won it in 2023 on the strength of Argentina’s 2022 World Cup triumph, in which he was the tournament’s central figure. He polled 462 points, a clear 105 ahead of Erling Haaland (357), with Kylian Mbappe third on 270. After years in which club form and rivalry with Ronaldo drove the conversation, the trophy that had eluded him at international level for so long ended up delivering the award that put him definitively out of reach. It was his first Ballon d’Or won as a player based outside Europe, having moved on from Barcelona.
What the eight add up to
Read together, the eight wins tell a more layered story than the headline number. Two of them (2009 and 2011) were landslides. One (2019) came down to seven points. Two (2010 and 2021) drew legitimate debate. They span a France Football award, a FIFA-run award, and a return to France Football again, which undercuts any argument that Messi benefited from a single friendly electorate. The wins also track a shift in what voters valued: the early trophies rewarded club dominance with Barcelona, while the last two leaned heavily on what he did for Argentina.
That range is the real record. Plenty of players have won a Ballon d’Or in a peak season. Messi won it as a prodigy, as the anchor of a dynasty, in a photo finish against a defender, and finally as a world champion in his mid-thirties. Eight trophies is the number people remember, but the way they were earned, across different rules and different phases of a career, is what makes the tally so hard to imagine being matched.