The Ballon d'Or is a discredited, dysfunctional, overblown, secretive PR exercise for football. Yesterday it came up with the most egregious decision in its 69 years of existence.
Was Ousmane Dembele the best footballer in the world in the last 12 months? It's arguable and generally (this an important point) the award goes to a player of a team which has won something, often the UEFA Champions League, but it's undoubtedly true that the player who contributed most to Paris Saint-Germain winning the 2025 Champions League was goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnaruma. Without his heroics in the semi final against Arsenal, PSG wouldn't have even have made it to the final. But the voters (more on them in a minute) love attackers and a goalkeeper has only won it once - Lev Yashin in 1963.
But this wasn't the worst decision.
Third place in the Ballon d'Or Féminin went to Alessia Russo. She won the Euros with England and the Champions League with Arsenal.
Second place went to Mariona Caldentey. She won the Champions League with Arsenal.
First place went to Aitana Bonmati. She won nothing.
But she got the sympathy vote because she recovered from viral meningitis earlier in the year, which gained her support, in the few months prior to voting, from the football chattering classes - a process well known to Oscar voters. I knew she would win; there's a strong Spanish-speaking constituency, a dominant Catalan influence and the sports writers who vote think Barcelona are the dog's bollocks of the soccer world. Bonmati has now won the award for three years in a row. Arsenal will beat Barcelona in the Champions League final again next May and she'll still win it a fourth time.
And the whole process is embarrassingly Eurocentric. No winner of the South American Copa Libertadores has ever won it.
The voters are one sports reporter from each of FIFA's 211 member countries. I tried to find out who the England person was this time but it seems bound up in secrecy.
You can probably tell I'm not happy.
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