One Journalist From a Country of 700,000 People Can Decide Who Wins the Ballon d’Or

Rodri won the 2024 Ballon d’Or by 41 points over Vinicius Junior, a margin narrow enough that Real Madrid formally boycotted the ceremony in protest. When the full voting breakdown was eventually published, the story got more specific.

Three individual journalists, representing Finland, El Salvador, and Namibia, hadn’t included Vinicius anywhere in their top ten at all. Real Madrid president Florentino Perez later singled out four countries by name in a public rant, arguing that if journalists from Namibia, Uganda, Albania, and Finland simply hadn’t voted, Vinicius would have won outright.

The voting system that produces outcomes like this isn’t a glitch. It’s working exactly as designed.

How the actual math works

The Ballon d’Or is decided by one journalist per country, drawn from the top 100 nations in FIFA’s rankings for the men’s award and the top 50 for the women’s. Each of those hundred individual voters ranks ten players in order of preference from a shortlist, with points awarded on a sliding scale, 15 for first place down to 1 for tenth. Whoever accumulates the most total points across all hundred ballots wins.

That structure means every single country gets precisely equal voting weight regardless of population, football infrastructure, or how closely that country’s media actually follows the specific players being judged. A journalist covering football in a nation of a few hundred thousand people carries exactly the same influence as a journalist embedded in Spain, England, or Brazil, covering the leagues where the actual candidates play every week.

A history longer than one controversial year

The 2024 vote wasn’t an isolated flashpoint. In 2010, Zambia’s national team captain Chris Katongo publicly said he’d voted for Xavi, only for his ballot to be recorded as a vote for Xabi Alonso instead, a clerical mix-up nobody ever formally corrected.

In 2018, it emerged that a “journalist” from Comoros who’d voted that year didn’t actually exist, tied to a news outlet that had been defunct for six years. His fictional ballot happened not to swing the result, since Luka Modrić won by a wide enough margin, but the fact it happened at all exposed how little verification the voting process actually involved at the time.

Coaches and captains, who also participate in a related voting process for national team awards, have shown their own version of the same structural weakness. French coach Didier Deschamps, French captain Hugo Lloris, and a French media representative all separately ranked Franck Ribéry first in the same year, a pattern that raised obvious questions about national loyalty overriding genuinely independent judgment.

Why the outrage keeps missing the actual problem

Every year the award produces a close or surprising result, the conversation focuses on which specific journalists got it “wrong,” treating individual voters as the villains of the story. That framing skips past the more useful question: a voting system built on one equally-weighted vote per country was never designed to reliably surface the single best-informed consensus. It was designed to be broadly international and inclusive, values that are genuinely reasonable on their own terms but that trade off directly against precision.

Every close Ballon d’Or race produces this exact same controversy because the system practically guarantees it. The award keeps being treated as a broken process needing individual accountability, when the more honest explanation is that it’s functioning as designed, and that design was never built to optimize for the outcome fans actually expect from it.

Would the Ballon d’Or produce fairer results with a smaller panel of genuinely expert voters, even if that meant sacrificing the current system’s broad international representation?