The Golden Ball will live a before and after in this 2022. As announced by the prestigious sports newspaper L’Equipe, they will start up until four changes for this edition of the golden award.
The Argentine star Leo Messiis the current winner after beating Robert Lewandowski in 2021, which was the seventh in his private account and the most successful player by far. In women’s football, the FC Barcelona player, Alexia Putellas, prevailed, while the Kopa went to Pedri and the Yachine, to Gianluigi Donnarumma.
The main novelty in the conditions of the award is to take into account the current season and not the calendar year. So far, the Ballon d’Or had spanned from January to December. However, as of this same 2022 the season with which it starts will be taken into account: 2021/22 in 2022, 2022/23 in 2023 and so on.
Due to this rule of thumb, in the 2022 Ballon d’Or, only the 2021/22 season will be valued, so the Qatar World Cup is left out: the World Cup event will be part of the 2023 award as it will be played at the end of the year and not in summer as usual.
The lists, the votes and the voters
The other three Ballon d’Or changes go through the process of choosing and voting for the winners. Those chosen for men’s, women’s football and the Yachine and Kopa awards They will no longer be exclusively selected by France Football and L’Equipe: The ambassador of the Ballon d’Or, Didier Drogba, will be added, as well as the voters of the last edition who came closest to guessing the final result (Truong Anh Ngoc, Gordon Watson and Karolina Hlavackova).
In this line, the representatives of the FIFA federations will be reduced to the first 100 countries, unlike the 170 that have voted so far. In this way, it is avoided that those countries in which a certain football culture has not been rooted do not condition the final result, according to the French newspaper.
