The Best Female Goalkeepers: The Award Only Started in 2025

Why this question was unanswerable until recently

Ranking goalkeepers is genuinely hard. Clean sheets depend on the defence in front of you. Save percentage depends on the quality of shots you face. A keeper at a dominant club faces fewer, better chances than one at a struggling side, and neither number captures it.

Which is why an award — voted, published, contested — is better evidence than any writer’s shortlist. And for women’s football, the relevant award did not exist until 2025.

The dates, side by side

Award	First given	First winner
The Best FIFA Women’s Goalkeeper	2019	Sari van Veenendaal (NED)
Men’s Yashin Trophy (Ballon d’Or)	2019	Alisson (BRA)
Women’s Yashin Trophy (Ballon d’Or)	2025	Hannah Hampton (ENG)

FIFA and the Ballon d’Or both introduced a men’s goalkeeper prize and a women’s recognition in the same era — but the Ballon d’Or’s women’s goalkeeper award arrived six years after the men’s.

For those six years, a woman goalkeeper’s only route to Ballon d’Or recognition was to be voted against forwards and midfielders.

What happened when they were

Predictably, they lost.

No goalkeeper has ever won the Ballon d’Or Féminin. The best placing is Mary Earps, fifth, in 2023 — and that came in a year in which she had been extraordinarily prominent, including at a World Cup.

Fifth is the ceiling for the position, which is not a judgement about Earps. It is what happens when you ask voters to compare a shot-stopper with someone who scored forty goals. The men’s award had been created in 2019 for precisely that reason; the same logic simply took longer to be applied.

The first Women’s Yashin Trophy, 2025

Hannah Hampton of England and Chelsea won it, after 13 clean sheets in Chelsea’s unbeaten 2024/25 season and England’s Euro 2025 win.

The full published top five:

	Goalkeeper
1	Hannah Hampton (England, Chelsea)
2	Ann-Katrin Berger (Germany)
3	Cata Coll (Spain)
4	Chiamaka Nnadozie (Nigeria)
5	Daphne van Domselaar (Netherlands)

Hampton also took The Best FIFA Women’s Goalkeeper in the same cycle. Two separate voting bodies, with different electorates, reaching the same conclusion is about as strong as evidence gets in a subjective category.

Note the range in that list — England, Germany, Spain, Nigeria, the Netherlands. Nnadozie’s placing is the one worth pausing on, as a marker of how far the voting pool now reaches beyond the traditional European and North American powers.

Three awards arrived at once

The main award changed at the same time, and more fundamentally: from 2022 the Ballon d’Or stopped counting career achievement altogether. See how Ballon d’Or voting works.

The Women’s Yashin Trophy was not introduced alone. For 2024/25 the Ballon d’Or added three new women’s categories: the Yashin Trophy for goalkeepers, the Kopa Trophy for the best young player, and the Gerd Müller Trophy for the leading scorer.

That is the more revealing fact. The women’s game did not gain a goalkeeper award because goalkeeping suddenly improved. It gained one because the awards structure around the women’s game was built out to match the men’s, in a single step, having lagged it for years.

The same pattern appears in what women’s footballers are paid: the sport’s institutions are being retrofitted at speed, and the gaps that remain are usually gaps in infrastructure rather than in the football.

So who is the best?

Hannah Hampton, on the evidence available — two independent awards in the same cycle, and the first holder of a trophy that will define the position from here.

Ask again in three years and the answer should be easier to give, because there will be a run of winners to compare rather than one. That is what an award does that a list cannot: it accumulates.

More record and reference pages are in reference, including Grand Slam women’s singles champions, where the leading number turns on a definitional question rather than a sporting one.