How Ballon d'Or Voting Works — and What Changed in 2022

The mechanics

Each voting journalist picks five players from a 30-player shortlist and ranks them. The rankings carry different weights:

Position	Points
1st	6
2nd	4
3rd	3
4th	2
5th	1

Note the gap between first and second. Six to four is a much steeper drop than four to three, so a player who collects a lot of first-place votes is rewarded far more than one who is consistently placed second or third.

That single design choice favours polarising, decisive campaigns over broadly admired ones. A player half the electorate ranks first will beat a player everyone ranks second.

August to July, not January to December

Until 2022, the Ballon d’Or covered a calendar year. That never matched how football is actually organised.

European football runs August to July. A calendar-year award cut every season in half and judged players on two halves of two different seasons — the back end of one campaign and the front end of the next, with a summer in between.

Since 2022 the award covers the season, August to July. The award now matches the unit the sport actually plays in, which is a straightforwardly better fit.

Career success no longer counts

This is the change with the sharpest consequences, and it is the least discussed.

Before 2022, a voter could legitimately weigh what a player had achieved over a career. From 2022 that was removed: the criteria are individual performance in the season just finished, then team success over that season, then behaviour and fair play.

The award became a season prize rather than a standing. An established great no longer carries credit into the ballot, and a player having the best year of their life is judged on that year alone.

That is a genuine narrowing, and it changes what the trophy means. It is no longer an answer to who is the best player in the world — it is an answer to who was best this season, which is a different question that happens to produce a similar-looking trophy.

The electorate was cut by nearly half

Historically a media member from more than 180 nations held a ballot. Since 2022 that is limited to the top 100 countries in the FIFA men’s rankings, and the top 50 for the women’s award.

The rationale is concentration: journalists from the highest-ranked footballing nations are, in principle, closest to the football being judged.

The trade-off is real and worth naming. A smaller electorate is more expert and less representative. Voices from nations outside the top 100 were removed, and with them a set of perspectives on which players are visible and valued outside the major European leagues.

Both effects are true at once, and which one matters more is a judgement about what the award is for.

Where this sits among sporting awards

The Ballon d’Or is unusual in being decided by journalists rather than by a federation, players, or a panel appointed by the sport.

Compare the Women’s Yashin Trophy, where two separate electorates reaching the same conclusion is treated as strong evidence — precisely because the award structure is contested and any single vote is only one instrument.

And compare a governing body’s own process: the Olympic programme is decided by an IOC Session vote, with criteria published in advance. Both are votes. One is accountable to a membership; the other to nobody in particular, which is both its weakness and the reason it has credibility with supporters.

More on how sport is governed is in how sport is run.