Does the Ballon d'Or favour attackers and a handful of leagues?

Critics have occasionally called the Ballon d'Or a "popularity contest", criticizing its voting process and its bias in favour of attacking players. The winners' list gives them material: over time the award has gone to a more exclusive set of leagues and clubs. Before 1995, ten leagues supplied winners; since then, only England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States have. La Liga has the most winners overall, with twenty-four wins shared between Barcelona and Real Madrid, twelve each. Lionel Messi is the only player to have won it while playing outside Europe.

The exceptions are few. Lev Yashin, the Soviet goalkeeper, won in 1963 and remains the only goalkeeper to have received the Ballon d'Or. He stopped 151 penalty kicks, more than any other goalkeeper in history. Fabio Cannavaro's 2006 win made him only the third defender ever to win, after Franz Beckenbauer and Matthias Sammer. And Rodri's 2024 win made him the first defensive midfielder to win since Lothar Matthäus in 1990.

A list of winners cannot show why voters chose them, but ballots can. Studying the FIFA version of the award, where captains, coaches and journalists voted, Coupe and colleagues found that voters were four times more likely to vote for a candidate from their own national team or league team. Michael Johnson and Ian McCarthy, using 10,305 votes from 2010 to 2016, found that shared nationality, club or league went with biased voting, and that journalists were less biased than captains and coaches. They did not measure a taste for positions, but suggest that voters prefer forwards and midfielders, because scoring is more entertaining than tackling and saving shots.