Men's Ballon d'Or 2025: Who Wins Football's Biggest Prize?

The biggest award ceremony of Foodball has been announced. Yes! Men's Ballon d'Or 2025, this will be the 69th edition of the award this year which is going to be hosted on 22 September 2025 in Paris. The venue of which is Théâtre du Châtelet. The hype is quite real, as fans want to see their favourite players win it. So the biggest question is, who can be the winner of Men's Ballon d'Or 2025 this time? Will there be a new face or will a legend maintain his legacy? Right now the names of some contenders are coming out, they can lift the Ballon d'Or this time like Ousmane Dembélé (PSG) and Lamine Yamal (Barcelona). There is a huge difference between both the players, how will they do that, we will know in detail later. 

So today's blog post is on this topic that who will win football's biggest award Men's Ballon d'Or 2025, who will prove to be the best male footballer 2025? And we will also know why Messi and Ronaldo are not among the Ballon d'Or finalists this time, have there been any changes in the rules, we will know the answers to all these questions in this.

Format Changes and New Assessment Criteria

Season-Based Evaluation System

This time the nomination of players has been done according to the new rules in the Men's Ballon d'Or 2025. Now what are the new rules, so in 2022 the nomination process of Ballon d'Or has been changed. Earlier, till 2022, players were evaluated on the basis of their performances throughout the year, i.e., according to all the tournaments played from 1 January to 31 December.

But now according to the Ballon d'Or 2025 rules, players will be nominated on the basis of season performances. This season will be considered from 1 August 2024 to July 31, 2025. In this duration the complete European football season takes place, so whoever performs best in the season will be considered in the nomination from now on.

This football season will include Domestic leagues, European competitions and International tournaments. Organisers say that due to these new Ballon d'Or rule changes there will be a fair selection and the audience has also accepted it. Because through this, the result will be given by tracking the performance of a player throughout the season, so the one who is the best from the beginning will be entitled to the award.

What has changed due to the rules change?

There has been a big change due to the Ballon d'Or rules changes, or rather many fans say that now there will be a fair result. Because in the earlier criteria, the performance of the players during the calendar year was considered. In which all the performances from January to December were considered. But the biggest problem in this was that tournaments of 2 different years were combined in one calendar year. Like in January to July, the finals of the previous year were held and from Aug to Dec, the starting matches of the current season were held. Due to this, whichever player got nominated, only his best performances of the finals were highlighted.

The loophole in this was that some players did not perform well in the beginning, yet if they performed well in the finals (January to July phase), they got nominated. Due to this, the players who performed well in the beginning did not get a chance.

But now with the introduction of the new rule system, the award will be given only to those players who were excellent performers throughout the season.

Voting Process and Criteria

Now that you have understood the rules, let us now understand the Ballon d'Or voting process. The voting process is a simple process in which the structure given below is followed like:

1. A team of total 100 Journalists associated with top ranked nations of FIFA are called.
2. Out of these, every journalist has to select top 5 players from the shortlisted 30 players.
3. The journalists can rank these top 5 players in any way, but points are given to the players according to their ranking.
4. Like 1st Position: 6 Points, 2nd: 4 points, 3rd: 3 Points, 4th: 2 Points, 5th: 1 Point etc.
5. Now the player who achieves the maximum points in this list is declared the Ballon d'Or Winner.

So this was the process of voting. But while voting journalists do not just select randomly, there is a criteria for it which they always follow. Such as:

1. How is the individual game of the player? What do his stats say so far?
2. What is the record of the team from which the player comes? The player's performances for his country or club are also considered.
3. And whether the player has followed discipline and rules throughout his career or not, how has his behaviour been till now, all these things are also looked at.

But all these things are considered only within the scope of the season. Past records are not given any importance in this. Whatever the player has done between 1 August and 31 July is only counted.

Now with these new rules and strictness of fair voting process, Ballon d'Or is becoming even better than before. Now whichever player keeps his and his team's game at the best level in the current season will become the Ballon d'Or winner.