The Golden Ball revolutionizes its rules

‘France Football’ revolutionizes the Ballon d’Or rules to try to put a stop to the controversy. The prestigious award presented annually by the French magazine will from now on be aligned with the football season and will focus on individual merits, reducing the considerable weight that collective trophies had when designating the best footballer on the planet.

The next Ballon d’Or award ceremony will be held in September or October of this year and will assess the performance offered by the candidates throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, instead of focusing on what happened between January and December, as had been happening Until now. A decision whose objective is to make the arguments that lead the jury to select the best player in the world more understandable, as announced this Friday by the magazine that has granted the appreciated recognition since 1956.

This means that the World Cup in Qatar, which will be held between November 21 and December 18 of this year, will affect the prize that will be awarded in 2023, while the Women’s European Championship, which will take place between November 6 and July 31, it will count for the designation of the award in the women’s category, whose last winner was the Spanish Alexia Putellas.

The new regulation also develops another crucial change that consists of putting the individual performances of the candidates in the foreground, reducing the attention that until now was given to the trophies won by the applicants in their respective clubs and national teams. That aspect had been one of the main reasons for friction.

Recent is still the controversy generated in the last edition, which enthroned Leo Messi for the seventh time as the best player on the planet, above other rivals such as the Polish Robert Lewandowski or the French Karim Benzema who had also excelled with their numbers. “It’s about avoiding ambiguities, being clear and consistent: the Ballon d’Or is an individual distinction, based on individual performances,” said Pascal Ferré, editor-in-chief of ‘France Football’ when announcing the news.

New selection process

Since 2008, the Ballon d’Or had been a private preserve for Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who shared the awards granted since that year with the only exception of the award given to Luka Modric in 2018, which rewarded the exceptional contribution of the midfielder by carrying to the Croatian team to the runner-up in the World Cup in Russia and to be a fundamental figure in the thirteenth Champions won by Real Madrid. The purpose of ‘France Football’ is for the Ballon d’Or to stop taking into account the entire career of the player in question and exclusively value his performance in the current season, which would generate greater competition. The class of the footballer and his sense of fair play will also be valued.

The changes introduced also affect the candidate selection process. The preparation of the lists of thirty contenders for the men’s award, twenty for the women’s and ten for the Kopa and Yashine Trophies, which had been the exclusive responsibility of the editorial staff of ‘France Football’, will incorporate new actors such as the former Ivorian soccer player Didier Drogba and the voters of the last edition whose designations were closer to the final winners. Finally, the number of voters is reduced, going from the representatives of 170 countries that participated to date to the first 100 of the FIFA ranking that will be able to pronounce themselves from now on, with the purpose of raising the quality of the votes.