France Football has settled the long-running debate over how closely winning the World Cup is tied to claiming the Ballon d’Or, football’s most coveted individual prize.
With the World Cup currently underway across Canada, Mexico and the United States, the magazine revisited its archives to examine the relationship between the two honours, focusing on the period since 1995, the year the award was opened up to players from outside Europe.
Going further back, the World Cup and Ballon d’Or double had once seemed almost guaranteed for the game’s biggest stars. Bobby Charlton, Paolo Rossi and Lothar Matthaus all managed the feat in earlier eras of the tournament, and the trend appeared to solidify when Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo and Fabio Cannavaro pulled off the same double in 1998, 2002 and 2006 respectively, three World Cup wins in a row each accompanied by the sport’s top individual honour.
That streak, however, was not built to last forever.
In 2010, Spain lifted the trophy in South Africa, yet it was Lionel Messi, not World Cup winners Andres Iniesta or Xavi, who took home the Ballon d’Or. Four years later, Cristiano Ronaldo beat out both runner-up Messi and World Cup-winning goalkeeper Manuel Neuer for the prize. The trend continued in 2018, when Luka Modric won the Ballon d’Or despite Croatia losing in the final.
The double briefly resurfaced at the 2022 tournament in Qatar, when Messi’s World Cup triumph with Argentina was followed by a Ballon d’Or win the following year.
Crunching the numbers, France Football found that since 1995, only four of the seven World Cup-winning players have gone on to claim the Ballon d’Or in the same year, a success rate of just 57%.
The magazine’s conclusion was clear: lifting the World Cup alone isn’t enough to guarantee football’s top individual prize. As they put it, “To win the coveted award, you need to have been the best player of the season.”
