Alexia Putellas has won the 2026 Ballon d’Or Feminin, her third triumph in the women’s award and the result that pulls her level with Barcelona and Spain team-mate Aitana Bonmati at the summit of its honours list. The 32-year-old was crowned at a ceremony staged at the London Palladium on 26 October 2026, a night that formed part of the wider Ballon d’Or event in London.
The headline is the tie, not a new solo record. Putellas first lifted the trophy in 2021 and retained it in 2022. Bonmati then put together three consecutive wins in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Putellas’s 2026 success ends that sequence and leaves the pair joint-top on three each. She is not, on the evidence of this result, the outright record holder, and any framing that casts her as standing alone misreads the arithmetic.
A Short History, Already Dominated by Spain
Context matters here, and it is worth separating two things that get conflated on ceremony night. The men’s Ballon d’Or is a long-running institution, and the 2026 gala was spoken of in terms of a landmark edition for the event as a whole. The women’s prize is a far younger creature. The Ballon d’Or Feminin was first awarded in 2018, when Norway’s Ada Hegerberg became its inaugural recipient. Any reference to a 70th edition belongs to the men’s award and the broader ceremony, not to the women’s trophy, which has only existed for a handful of years.
That brevity makes the Putellas and Bonmati double act all the more striking. In an award with a short list of winners, two players from the same club and the same national team now sit above everyone else. Between them they have claimed the prize in five of its editions, a concentration of success that says as much about Barcelona Femeni’s era of control as it does about either individual.
3Putellas Ballon d'Or Feminin titles (2021, 2022, 2026)The Season Behind the Trophy
Individual awards in football are almost always downstream of team success, and 2025/26 gave Putellas a platform few could match. She captained Barcelona to a quadruple, the kind of clean sweep that tends to decide these votes before the shortlist is even drawn up. The haul included the UEFA Women’s Champions League and the Liga F domestic title, alongside the Copa de la Reina and the Spanish Super Cup.
Her personal numbers reinforced the case. Across the campaign she was credited with 21 goals and 13 assists for Barcelona, a return that combined a midfielder’s creative volume with a forward’s end product. Figures reported for the goal tally cluster around the 20 to 21 mark depending on the source, but the broad picture is consistent: a season of high output from a player operating as both orchestrator and finisher.
| Ballon d’Or Feminin | Winner | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Ada Hegerberg | Norway |
| 2021 | Alexia Putellas | Spain |
| 2022 | Alexia Putellas | Spain |
| 2023 | Aitana Bonmati | Spain |
| 2024 | Aitana Bonmati | Spain |
| 2025 | Aitana Bonmati | Spain |
| 2026 | Alexia Putellas | Spain |
Reading the Tie With Bonmati
What makes the 2026 result interesting as a reference point is less the number itself than the symmetry it creates. Two players, both central to the same dominant club, both products of the Spanish system, now share the women’s game’s most prestigious individual honour. The order of their wins tells its own story: Putellas set the early pace with back-to-back titles, Bonmati answered with a three-year run of her own, and Putellas has now responded to level the ledger.
It is also a result that resists the temptation to overstate. There is no outright record to celebrate, no lone figure at the top of the list. The honest description is a shared peak, and that is the version that will hold up when the next edition is handed out and the tie is either broken or extended.
A Return to the Top After Injury
The longer arc gives the win extra weight. Putellas’s first two titles came at the height of a run that established her as the defining midfielder of her generation. A serious knee injury then interrupted that trajectory and reshaped expectations around her. To return to the very top of the individual rankings years later, after Bonmati had taken ownership of the award, is the kind of second act that reference lists rarely capture in a single line.
Her playing home throughout has been FC Barcelona, the club where she built her reputation and where the 2025/26 quadruple was assembled. The trophy recognises that club season specifically, a body of work compiled across a demanding calendar of domestic and European football.
Where the Record Stands
As a settled matter of record, the position after the 2026 ceremony is straightforward. Alexia Putellas and Aitana Bonmati are tied on three Ballon d’Or Feminin titles each, the joint-most in an award that has only existed since 2018. Ada Hegerberg remains its first winner. Spain remains, by a distance, its most successful nation, with the two Barcelona midfielders accounting for the bulk of its editions.
The analytical takeaway is simple enough to state and worth stating precisely: 2026 did not crown a sole record holder. It produced a tie, and a compelling one, between two players whose careers have been intertwined at club and country for the better part of a decade. The women’s Ballon d’Or is young, its list of champions still short, and for now its most-decorated line reads two names, not one.
