The Ballon d’Or and why football has become so obsessed with individual awards

This is an updated version of a piece that was published in September 2025. 

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It is a quarter of a century since Michael Owen won the Ballon d’Or, and the story of his coronation as Europe’s best footballer belongs to a different era.

Word of the young forward’s ascent to that elite bracket was quietly delivered by his then Liverpool manager Gerard Houllier in a 2001 telephone call, but Owen, only 22 at the time, remembers it as carrying little significance. “It didn’t change the way I felt about myself,” he told The Athletic in 2024. “I certainly wasn’t doing cartwheels.”

Owen remains the last Englishman to win a prize first awarded to Blackpool’s Stanley Matthews in 1956, but it is safe to assume the next to lift the Ballon d’Or will enjoy a very different moment of recognition. We might find that out this year, with Harry Kane the bookmakers’ favourite to win the award.

Ousmane Dembele certainly did in 2025. The 29-year-old attacking star of Paris Saint-Germain and France was tearful when handed one of those coveted golden footballs by Brazilian great Ronaldinho. “What I have just experienced is exceptional,” said Dembele, who was joined on stage by his mother at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris.

The Ballon d’Or, organised by the magazine France Football, has increasingly become a barometer of greatness. It is the individual prize ranked above all others and the one that elevates players to European football’s canon. It mattered to Dembele, and it now matters to millions, too.

Mediametrie, a company that measures audience figures in France, found that just under 2.5m people viewed Dembele being awarded his trophy live on the L’Equipe channel last year, with an average of 1.6m watching the ceremony unfold. Another 5m watched a variety of outputs on L’Equipe’s YouTube channel over the course of the day.

The Ballon d’Or, which also crowned Aitana Bonmati as the world’s best women’s player for a third year in a row, could be found trending across all social media platforms throughout the day and the first post confirming Dembele’s victory on X eventually had a reach of 19m users.

Those figures illustrate the snowballing significance of football’s biggest individual honour. It is now a night — and build-up — that demands attention, creating discourse that runs through a season. In what will always be a team sport, there is now a sharper focus than ever on individuals.

“The whole dynamic of the Ballon d’Or has changed because the dynamic of the sports and entertainment industry has changed with the way individual athletes are marketed,” said Steve Martin, founding partner of MSQ Sport + Entertainment, formerly of M&C Saatchi.

“They’ve found a way as an individual athlete or player to build their own profile and their own fanbase, as opposed to relying on their clubs. They control their own destiny and they market themselves. That’s why the Ballon d’Or and other accolades are becoming more important than they’ve ever been. We’ve also got fans now following individual players. You could be a Liverpool fan, for example, but also love Kylian Mbappe or Jude Bellingham. That’s why it’s transcended.”

Dembele, in the end, won with what has been described as “overwhelming support” in a voting process that sees one journalist from each of the top 100 FIFA-ranked nations order their 10 best players of the previous season.

The breakdown gets disclosed by organisers in the weeks afterwards, but decisions were ultimately shaped by individual performances, as well as those of their team. “If I were to give you an idea, it wasn’t a race, honestly,” Vincent Garcia, editor-in-chief of France Football, told L’Equipe TV after the ceremony.

Dembele appeared in every voter’s top 10 last year, and was named in first place 73 times (out of 100). The weighting system of the votes means that those 73 first-place nods led him to a comfortable win: a No 1 vote is worth 15 points, a No 2 vote is worth 12, a No 3 is worth 10, and on down the line to a No 10 ranking, which is worth one point.

That subjectivity and secrecy over how a winner is selected also builds suspense, particularly in the years that follow an era dominated by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, where a deeper pool of candidates now swims.

“The Ballon d’Or is one of those moments that means content creators, social media platforms and media platforms across all the major European markets are focused on the same thing,” said Dan Haddad, head of commercial strategy at Octagon, a sports, music and entertainment agency. “You’ll tend to find that every European market is focused on their domestic league and the global market conversation will peak around specific games in the major leagues, rather than a moment.

“People seem to love what is a very subjective conversation around the stature and ranking of players. A key thing around the Ballon d’Or is the methodology and voting, which leads to wild speculation. There’s that real subjectivity and club rivalry polarisation that comes to the fore.”

That tribalism, so often most noticeable on social media, also brings its own layer of interest to individual honours. Few would begrudge Mohamed Salah his Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year prize for his 2024-25 season with Liverpool, but there are always reflected glories back to the club and its supporters. The same applies to divisional teams of the year, decided by a player’s peers. One omission and another’s inclusion can rankle.

FIFA, an organisation well-versed in understanding the direction of travel, has attempted to carve out its own place in this global market. The Best FIFA Football Awards were launched in 2017 and now, with a ceremony every December, provide an alternative to the Ballon d’Or.

Not that it carries equal significance, even if allowing fans to vote in some categories, but football has subtly followed a U.S. lead, where individual prizes have long resonated. The NBA’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) effectively anoints a basketball great each year, while the NFL’s Top 100 has enough interest to warrant a TV series each off-season.

“One of the USPs around the NBA as a property is that it’s very player and celebrity driven,” added Haddad. “That kind of element in football has definitely exploded, contributing to why there’s so much debate and discussion around these awards.

“You’ve got more and more football players and their management teams trying to monetise their image and intellectual property, turning them into brands beyond the pitch. With the imminent departure of Messi and Ronaldo from the scene, there’s a battle to push forward the next global superstars to take those places. The Ballon d’Or has a lot of significance in creating that next superstar.”

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Loyalties typically drive a supporter’s wish to see their favourites win the biggest accolades but that, in turn, bleeds into why individual honours now mean so much to players and their clubs.

The Ballon d’Or acts as an endorsement, a shortcut that tells the world who ought to be considered the best. It is why Vinicius Junior and Real Madrid reacted so badly when Rodri, then playing for Manchester City, took the big prize in 2024 and perhaps also why Lamine Yamal’s father struck such a sour tone in reaction to Dembele’s big moment last year.

Being the Ballon d’Or winner is commercially huge. Dembele, for example, attracted almost 1m new followers to his Instagram account in the 48 hours after his big night in Paris, and his boot sponsor, Adidas, was among the first to savour his moment with coordinated posts across social media platforms.

Paris Saint-Germain will also know its worth. Club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi attended the ceremony last year and posed with Dembele, the attacker who in 2024-25 played a huge role in ending PSG’s long wait for a Champions League title. Having another Ballon d’Or winner in their ranks, the first since Messi left for Inter Miami, helped the French side add another layer of prestige in a calendar year that changed everything at the Parc des Princes. There will be plenty of PSG players on the shortlist for the 2026 award too, after they retained the Champions League in May.

“You always need individual stars in sport,” said commercial expert Martin. “It’s not just about teams. If there weren’t individual stars, then it wouldn’t appeal to aspiration and looking up to people.

“We’re fascinated by individual players and star players, and that brings huge commercial returns. The one who was the Trojan horse with that was (Cristiano) Ronaldo. He’s the one who changed the whole game on that and, as a result, there’s been a complete swell in the team you build around you to amplify your image.

“It matters to the individual for sure, but the clubs, commercially, have the ability to say they’ve got the Ballon d’Or winner and sell that point. We’re not talking about domestic fanbases anymore with any of these clubs. They all have a global fanbase and the more they can globalise it, the better.”

It took Owen until his £8million move to Real Madrid in 2004 for the penny to drop on what he had won three years earlier. He says that the Ballon d’Or began to feel “like a knighthood” during his time at the Bernabeu.

Now that honour has never felt bigger.

(Top photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)