I'm writing this from my wheelchair, watching the golden glow of my laptop screen as news breaks from Paris. Ousmane Dembélé has just claimed the 2025 Ballon d'Or, and I can't shake this nagging feeling that we're witnessing something profound—not just about football, but about how we measure greatness itself. What's bothering me: the Ballon d'Or has become a mathematical equation disguised as artistic judgment. The voting system now resembles a Eurovision contest more than a celebration of football poetry. We're so obsessed with quantifying brilliance that we might be killing the very magic we're trying to honor.
But let me tell you why I think we've got this all wrong, and why tonight's ceremony in Paris reveals something deeper about human nature than any sports award should.
The Science of Subjectivity
The crisp autumn air in my study carries the faint scent of old books as I dive into the mechanics of this award. One hundred journalists from the top FIFA-ranked nations cast their votes, each selecting ten players in order of preference . The winner receives 15 points, second place receives 12, and so on, down to a single point for tenth place.
It sounds scientific, doesn't it? But here's where it gets interesting from a behavioral perspective.
When Paolo Condò, Italy's representative voter, clicks "submit" on his electronic ballot, he's not just choosing the best player—he's unconsciously weighing cultural biases, recent memory effects, and narrative preferences . The human brain, magnificent as it is, struggles with objective assessment when emotions run high.
I've spent years studying how we process complex information, and the Ballon d'Or voting system fascinates me precisely because it pretends to be objective while being fundamentally subjective. Each voter brings their own lens—their country's football culture, their personal aesthetic preferences, their definition of what makes a player "great."
The Messi Paradox
Let's talk about Lionel Messi for a moment. Eight Ballon d'Ors. Eight . The man has won this award in three different decades, playing for three different clubs . When he claimed it while playing for Inter Miami in 2023, he became the first player to win while representing a non-European club .
But here's what strikes me: Messi's dominance reveals both the award's credibility and its limitations. His technical brilliance is undeniable—the way he manipulates space and time on a football pitch defies conventional physics. Yet his eight victories also highlight how the award can become self-perpetuating. Success breeds recognition, which breeds more success.
The sound of rain against my window reminds me of watching Messi play in a downpour years ago, his feet finding the ball with supernatural precision while others slipped and stumbled. That's the kind of moment that should define greatness—not the accumulation of statistical achievements or team trophies.
The Algorithm of Excellence
France Football's selection process begins with a preliminary screening by their editorial team, working alongside L'Équipe and UEFA ambassadors like LuÃs Figo and Fabio Capello . They narrow down the field to 30 candidates based on three criteria: individual performances and leadership qualities, team results, and class and fair play .
This is where the system both succeeds and fails spectacularly.
The texture of excellence in football isn't smooth—it's rough, unpredictable, sometimes ugly. A perfectly weighted through-ball that splits a defense might matter more than a hat-trick against weaker opposition. A goalkeeper's split-second decision in a crucial moment might define a season more than a striker's goal tally.
Yet the voting system, for all its sophistication, struggles to capture these nuances. How do you quantify the moment when Gianluigi Donnarumma—this year's Yashin Trophy winner—makes a save that changes the psychological momentum of an entire tournament? How do you measure the leadership that Lamine Yamal, at just 17, displayed when he won the Kopa Trophy for best young player The Democratization Dilemma
Here's something that keeps me awake at night: the more democratic we make the voting process, the more we might be diluting the very expertise we're seeking.
Between 2010 and 2015, the Ballon d'Or merged with FIFA's World Player of the Year award, expanding the voting pool to include coaches and national team captains from every FIFA-affiliated nation . The experiment failed, partly because it became unwieldy, but also because it revealed a fundamental tension in how we define authority.
Should the best player be chosen by those who understand the game's technical intricacies, or by a broader democratic process? It's the same question we face in science—do we trust peer review among specialists, or do we seek broader consensus?
The answer, I believe, lies somewhere in between. The current system of 100 journalists represents a compromise, but it's an imperfect one. These voters bring expertise, but they also bring the biases of their respective football cultures.
The Tyranny of Timing
The award now covers the football season from August 1st to July 31st, rather than the calendar year . This seemingly minor change has profound implications for how we perceive player performance.
Football careers are built on moments, not seasons. A player might have an average season punctuated by three games of absolute genius that change everything. Another might deliver consistent excellence that never quite reaches the peaks of brilliance we remember.
The seasonal approach makes sense logically—it aligns with how football is actually structured. But it also means that a player's World Cup performance in December might be forgotten by the time voting opens the following September.
This temporal bias affects how we construct narratives around greatness. Dembélé's Champions League triumph with PSG happened at the perfect moment in the voting cycle. Had it occurred three months later, would we be having a different conversation tonight?
The Weight of Numbers
Viktor Gyökeres won the Gerd Müller Trophy for most goals scored across club and international football The irony of sharing a name with this award isn't lost on me—though I suspect the legendary German striker and I have little in common beyond a first name.
But Gyökeres' recognition highlights something crucial: we're increasingly comfortable reducing football excellence to statistical outputs. Goals scored, assists provided, passes completed, distance covered. These metrics matter, but they're shadows of the real thing.
The most beautiful goal I ever witnessed wasn't the most technically difficult or the most important. It was a simple finish by a player whose name I've forgotten, in a match that meant nothing, but the way he struck the ball—the pure joy in that moment—captured something essential about why we love this game.
How do you quantify joy? How do you measure the collective intake of breath when 80,000 people witness something they've never seen before?
The Future of Recognition
As I finish writing this, the ceremony in Paris is winding down. Aitana Bonmatà has claimed her third consecutive women's Ballon d'Or, Arsenal has been named the best women's club and Luis Enrique has taken the coaching honor here's my prediction: the Ballon d'Or will continue to evolve, and that evolution will reflect broader changes in how we understand excellence itself**.
We're moving toward a world where data analytics can tell us things about player performance that the human eye misses. Expected goals, progressive passes, defensive actions—the metrics are becoming more sophisticated. But we're also becoming more aware of what these numbers can't capture.
The smell of fresh grass on a perfect playing surface. The weight of expectation in a packed stadium. The split-second decision that separates good players from great ones. These elements of football excellence resist quantification, and that's precisely what makes them valuable.
The Aha Moment
Here's what hit me as I watched tonight's ceremony: the Ballon d'Or isn't really about finding the best player—it's about creating a shared story that helps us make sense of a chaotic, beautiful game.
Every year, we gather around this golden sphere and pretend we can definitively rank human excellence. We can't, of course. Football is too complex, too dependent on context, too influenced by factors beyond individual control.
But the attempt itself matters. The debates, the arguments, the passionate defenses of our favorite players—these conversations force us to articulate what we value, what we consider beautiful, what we think makes someone great.
Dembélé deserves his award. His performances for PSG were genuinely exceptional But so did several other players on that stage tonight. The difference between first and second place often comes down to timing, narrative, and the collective mood of 100 journalists on a particular day.
And maybe that's okay.
The real value of the Ballon d'Or isn't in its accuracy as a measurement tool, but in its function as a catalyst for deeper conversations about excellence, beauty, and what we choose to celebrate in human achievement.
As I close my laptop and prepare for bed, I'm left with this thought: in a world increasingly dominated by algorithms and artificial intelligence, there's something beautifully human about our stubborn insistence on trying to measure the unmeasurable.
The Ballon d'Or, for all its flaws, represents our refusal to let excellence become purely computational. It's messy, subjective, and sometimes unfair—just like the beautiful game it seeks to honor.
And perhaps that's the most honest thing about it.
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