The time has almost come for the highest individual honour in football, the Ballon d’Or award presented by France Football. The award was cancelled in 2020 due to the Coronirus pandemic but it resumed last year as former Barcelona legend Lionel Messi won his 7th Ballon d’Or award.
This year the nominees for the Ballon d’Or 2022 will be revealed on 17th August and after the voting, the ceremony will be held on 17th October at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.
Robert Lewandowski was arguably the best footballer during 2020-21 however, he was beaten by Messi to the award which shocked the whole award. As a result, to have a fair voting process, there have been 4 key changes to the Ballon d’Or awards voting.
4 key changes to the Ballon d’Or 2022
- The award will only take into consideration the European calendar season which ends in June 2022. So, the World Cup will be taken into consideration from the 2023 edition of the award. It also helps create a more specific and equal timeframe for comparing the performance of individual players.
- Didier Drogba, Truong Anh Ngoc, and Czech juror Karolina Hlavackova have been added alongside the list of journalists to help combine the nominees for the award.
- Only the representatives of the first 100 countries in the FIFA rankings for the men’s award and the first 50 for the women’s will be permitted to vote.
- The Ballon d’Or will also take into consideration the collective performance and the ‘class’ of a player alongside their fair play record. The reputation and past success of players will not be taken into consideration when determining their ranking in the final ceremony.
For this year’s award, Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema, Bayern Munich’s Robert Lewandowski and Liverpool’s Sadio Mane are the prime contenders.
