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France Football, the magazine that organizes the much-celebrated Ballon d’Or award, has announced a set of new criteria for claiming football’s most prestigious individual award for the current and future seasons.
Instead of a calendar year, the Ballon d’Or will now be awarded based on performances throughout the course of a regular European season, the magazine said “The #ballondor will now be awarded on the basis of a classic football season: August to July!,” said the official Twitter of the Ballon d’Or committee.
The shift is said to be from the calendar rhythm to be based on the classic seasonality of football. This means the next evaluation will include the season starting with the major championships and the European preliminary rounds in August and ending with the closure of all competitions in July.
The Ballon d’Or said that this year’s award will include the Qatar World Cup, taking place between November 21 and December 18 in the 2023 edition.
The award committee also announced a change in the voting system for the Ballon d’Or, reducing the number of voters to include the top 100 countries in the FIFA ranking. France Football argued that reducing the number of voters is meant to boost the “level of expertise and limit rare fanciful votes.”
For the nominees’ list, France Football decided to add more members to its already existing list of journalists who suggest candidates. “To the lists of FF (and L’Équipe) journalists will now be added BdO ambassador Didier Drogba (for the men’s BdO and the Yachine and Kopa Trophies) as well as the voter who has shown himself to be the most insightful in the previous edition,” the magazine said.
For the following edition, the magazine said that the Vietnamese Truong Anh Ngoc will provide his men’s list while the Czech juror Karolina Hlavackova (Ruik) will deliver a twenty-candidate list for the women’s Ballon d’Or. “From these lists will come the final official lists which will be unveiled in September,” France Football explained.
Discarding the “player’s career” criterion, organizers of Ballon d’Or have set out a criteria update for the selection of nominees. The first criterion is thus the player’s “individual performance and the decisive and impressive character of the contenders,” the magazine said.
“Criterion number 2 will focus on collective performance and the record accumulated during the season.” The “players’ sense of fair play” is the third criterion to decide on the players to be awarded, it added.
Lionel Messi was the winner in 2021 for his legendary performance with FC Barcelona. The Argentine football star has accumulated the highest number of trophies, with seven Ballon d’Or.
Cristiano Ronaldo has won the award five times, while Johan Cruyff, Michel Platini, and Marco van Basten have each won three times.
