When France Football handed out the first Ballon d’Or Féminin in 2018, it closed a strange gap in the sport’s history. The men’s Golden Ball had existed since 1956, yet the women’s game, by then professional across much of Europe and North America, had no equivalent from the award that carries the most prestige. The women’s prize arrived late, but it arrived at a moment when the elite level was accelerating, and its short roll of honour already reads like a map of where power in the women’s game has moved.
The trophy is decided by a jury of international journalists, one voter per country drawn from nations ranked highly by FIFA. Voters name their top players and the points are tallied, the same method used for the men’s award. Performances are judged across a full season rather than a calendar year, which is why a strong club campaign and a major international tournament in the same window tend to produce a clear winner.
2018: Ada Hegerberg breaks the ice
The inaugural winner was Ada Hegerberg of Norway, then the most feared goalscorer in Europe at Olympique Lyonnais. Lyon were in the middle of a run of dominance in the UEFA Women’s Champions League, and Hegerberg’s finishing was central to it. Her win should have been remembered purely for its football. Instead, the ceremony became a cautionary tale when the host asked her on stage whether she could twerk, a moment that drew immediate criticism and, fairly or not, framed early debate about how seriously the sport’s institutions took their own new award. Hegerberg’s runner-up that year was Denmark’s Pernille Harder, another forward at the peak of her powers.
2019: Rapinoe and a World Cup summer
The 2019 award went to Megan Rapinoe of the United States, and it followed one of the most complete individual tournaments the game has seen. At that summer’s Women’s World Cup in France, Rapinoe captained the United States to the title and finished as the tournament’s top scorer while also being named its best player. She was outspoken off the pitch and decisive on it, and the voters rewarded a season that combined a global trophy with individual production. England’s Lucy Bronze, a driving force for both Lyon and the national team, finished second, a nod to a defender operating at a level rarely matched in her position.
2020: the year with no winner
There is a deliberate blank in the record. France Football did not award any Ballon d’Or in 2020, men’s or women’s, citing the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic. Seasons were suspended, competitions were compressed or cancelled, and the organisers judged that conditions were too unequal to hold a fair vote. It remains the only interruption in the women’s award’s history, and it is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: there was no 2020 winner.
2021 and 2022: the Putellas years
When the award returned, it announced a new order. Alexia Putellas of Spain and Barcelona won in 2021 and again in 2022, becoming the first back-to-back winner in the award’s history. Her first win came off the back of a Barcelona side that had reached a new standard in Europe, winning the Champions League with a level of control that reshaped expectations for what a women’s club team could look like. Putellas, a midfielder who combined vision with a scorer’s instinct, was the face of that team.
Her second title, in 2022, arrived even as the year ended in personal misfortune, with a serious knee injury on the eve of the European Championship. The vote reflected the body of work she had produced across the qualifying season. England’s Beth Mead, the top scorer and best player of a home Euro won by the Lionesses, finished second, a result that underlined how close the argument had become at the top. A year earlier, Putellas had edged compatriot Jenni Hermoso.
2023 to 2025: Bonmatí matches the greats
The Barcelona thread continued, but the name changed. Aitana Bonmatí, Putellas’s midfield partner, won in 2023 after a season in which she was central to Barcelona’s continental success and then starred as Spain won the Women’s World Cup, where she was named the tournament’s best player. She retained the award in 2024, and then won a third straight time in 2025 following a domestic treble with Barcelona, a run to the Champions League final, and a standout European Championship in which she was voted player of the tournament.
3Consecutive wins by Aitana Bonmatí (2023-2025)That third consecutive win placed Bonmatí in company that had, until then, been exclusively male. Only Michel Platini and Lionel Messi had won three Ballons d’Or in a row. She is also the first player to win the women’s award three times, and to do it consecutively. In 2025 the runner-up was another Spaniard, Mariona Caldentey, with Bonmatí’s earlier defences coming against Australia’s Sam Kerr and Norway’s Caroline Graham Hansen.
Complete list of winners
| Year | Winner | Nationality | Club | Runner-up |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Ada Hegerberg | Norway | Olympique Lyonnais | Pernille Harder |
| 2019 | Megan Rapinoe | United States | Reign FC | Lucy Bronze |
| 2020 | Not awarded (cancelled) | |||
| 2021 | Alexia Putellas | Spain | Barcelona | Jenni Hermoso |
| 2022 | Alexia Putellas | Spain | Barcelona | Beth Mead |
| 2023 | Aitana Bonmatí | Spain | Barcelona | Sam Kerr |
| 2024 | Aitana Bonmatí | Spain | Barcelona | Caroline Graham Hansen |
| 2025 | Aitana Bonmatí | Spain | Barcelona | Mariona Caldentey |
What the honour roll reveals
Read as a set, the winners tell a coherent story. The first two awards recognised individuals whose brilliance sat inside strong teams, a Lyon machine and a World Cup-winning United States. Everything since has belonged to Spain and, more specifically, to Barcelona. Five of the seven awarded editions have gone to Spanish players, all of them Barcelona midfielders or forwards, and the club’s fingerprints are on every winner from 2021 onward. That is not an accident of voting fashion. It tracks a genuine competitive shift, as Barcelona built a system that produced both trophies and the kind of sustained individual excellence that juries reward.
There is also a positional pattern worth noting. After two forwards took the opening awards, the last five have gone to central midfielders and creators, players who set tempo rather than simply finish moves. That reflects how the elite women’s game has come to prize control and progression, and how the voters have followed the football rather than the goal tallies alone.
The Ballon d’Or Féminin is young, and its record is short enough to hold in a single glance. Yet within that short span it has already produced a first for the wider award, in Bonmatí’s three consecutive wins, and it has captured a clear era of dominance. For a prize that took so long to exist, it has wasted little time becoming the honour every player in the women’s game measures herself against.
