For most of its history the Ballon d’Or has produced clear winners. Alfredo Di Stéfano, Johan Cruyff, Marco van Basten and, in the modern era, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo often finished so far ahead that the runner-up was a footnote by the time the envelope was opened. But a handful of editions came down to the width of a single ballot, and those years reward a closer reading. They tell you as much about how the prize has been counted as about who deserved it.
The award, established by the French magazine France Football in 1956, was originally decided by a small panel of European journalists, one per participating nation, each ranking their top five. The scoring weightings, the size of the electorate and even the eligibility rules have all changed repeatedly since then. That matters here, because a three-point win in 1956 was drawn from a very different pool of votes than a forty-point win in the 2020s. With that caveat in place, these are the finishes that genuinely went to the wire.
1996: Sammer over Ronaldo by a single point
The tightest result in the award’s history arrived in 1996. Matthias Sammer, the sweeper who anchored Borussia Dortmund’s Bundesliga title and drove Germany to the European Championship at Wembley that summer, edged a 20-year-old Ronaldo by one point, 144 to 143. Alan Shearer finished a distant third on 107.
The symbolism was hard to miss. Sammer, operating as a libero in an era when the role was already fading, became the first defender to win the prize since Franz Beckenbauer two decades earlier, and no orthodox defender has won it outright since. Ronaldo, then at PSV Eindhoven and about to join Barcelona, would claim the award the following year and again in 2002. Had one journalist filled in a card differently, the young Brazilian’s collection would read three, and Sammer’s story would be a very different one.
1Point separating Sammer and Ronaldo in 1996The three-point classics: 1956 and 1977
The very first Ballon d’Or was almost as close. In 1956, Blackpool’s Stanley Matthews, then in his forties and still one of the most watchable wingers in Europe, won the inaugural vote with 47 points to Di Stéfano’s 44. Raymond Kopa (33) and Ferenc Puskás (32) followed, a top four that reads like a founding charter for the award. That three-point gap, drawn from a much smaller ballot, set an early standard for how narrow these decisions could be.
The 1977 edition produced the closest cluster at the very top the prize has ever seen. Allan Simonsen, the Danish forward starring for Borussia Mönchengladbach, finished first on 74 points. Kevin Keegan, freshly arrived at Hamburg after winning the European Cup with Liverpool, took second on 71. A 22-year-old Michel Platini, still at Nancy and years from his pomp at Juventus, came third on 70. First to third separated by four points, with the top two split by three, remains the tightest three-way finish in the record books.
The margins at a glance
| Year | Winner (points) | Runner-up (points) | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Matthias Sammer (144) | Ronaldo (143) | 1 |
| 1956 | Stanley Matthews (47) | Alfredo Di Stéfano (44) | 3 |
| 1977 | Allan Simonsen (74) | Kevin Keegan (71) | 3 |
| 2019 | Lionel Messi (686) | Virgil van Dijk (679) | 7 |
| 2021 | Lionel Messi (613) | Robert Lewandowski (580) | 33 |
| 2024 | Rodri (1,170) | Vinícius Júnior (1,129) | 41 |
The absolute point totals in the later rows dwarf the earlier ones because the electorate expanded enormously over the decades. Reading the margins in isolation would flatter the modern votes and undersell the old ones, which is why the raw gap is only part of the picture.
Modern near-misses: 2019, 2021 and 2024
By the time voting was opened to a much larger international jury, a seven-point gap counted as a photo finish. That was the story of 2019, when Messi collected his sixth award with 686 points to Virgil van Dijk’s 679. The Dutch centre-back had just carried Liverpool to the Champions League title and to the brink of the Premier League, and he came closer to the prize than any defender since Fabio Cannavaro won it in 2006. Cristiano Ronaldo was a long way back in third on 476.
Two years later, in 2021, Messi won again, this time on 613 points to Robert Lewandowski’s 580. The result drew heavy debate, partly because Lewandowski’s goal-scoring seasons for Bayern Munich were among the most prolific in the game’s history and partly because the prior year’s ceremony had been cancelled, denying him a vote he might well have won. Messi’s Copa América triumph with Argentina, his first major international honour, proved decisive with the electorate.
The 2024 edition brought another finish inside the margin of controversy. Rodri, the Manchester City and Spain midfielder, won with 1,170 points to Vinícius Júnior’s 1,129, a gap of 41. The narrowness was overshadowed by Real Madrid’s decision to boycott the ceremony once it became clear Vinícius would not win, a reminder that a close vote can generate as much heat as a landslide.
Why the numbers do not always compare cleanly
Any honest ranking of “closest races” has to acknowledge a break in the record. Between 2010 and 2015 the France Football award was merged with FIFA’s World Player of the Year to form the FIFA Ballon d’Or, and results in that window were reported as percentages of the vote rather than as the older points system. The 2013 edition is the clearest example: Cristiano Ronaldo won with 27.99 percent to Messi’s 24.72 percent, with Franck Ribéry third on 23.36 percent after a treble-winning season at Bayern Munich. That is a tight top three by any measure, but it sits on a different scale from the points totals before and after, so slotting it into a single table alongside 1996 or 2019 would be misleading.
There is also the matter of who was doing the voting. The early award was a European jury of print journalists. Eligibility was restricted to European players until 1995, then to players at European clubs, before opening fully in 2007. National-team captains and coaches were folded into the electorate during the FIFA years and later removed again. Each change altered not just the winner but the shape of the contest beneath them, which is why a runner-up’s total is best read against the specific rules of its year rather than the whole timeline.
The takeaway
Close races are where the Ballon d’Or shows its seams. They expose the scoring weightings, the size and makeup of the jury, and the subjective calls that separate a defender’s season from a striker’s. Measured purely by points, 1996 remains untouched, one solitary vote between Sammer and Ronaldo. Measured by the sense that a deserving player was denied by a whisker, van Dijk in 2019, Lewandowski in 2021 and Vinícius in 2024 all have a case. What links them is a simple point that gets lost when a winner runs away with it: on the closest nights, the trophy is decided not by consensus but by the handful of voters who saw the year slightly differently from everyone else.
