Messi, Bellingham, Rodri, Vini? Predicting the Ballon d’Or

It’s over — sort of, for a little while, at least.

The Champions League final wrapped up on June 1, and then the Euros kicked off less than two weeks later. And then the Copa América began less than a week after the Euros. It’s been close-to-nonstop soccer since last August.

There’s still more to come at the Olympics, which start next Friday, but there’s at least a tiny break at the top of the men’s game. (Women’s soccer at the Olympics is a senior event, but it’s mostly under-23 players in the men’s competition.) Most of Europe’s Big Five leagues won’t start their next seasons for another month.

So, what the heck are we supposed to do now? Speculate about transfers, obviously. But also: we can take a look back. The soccer world still really hasn’t developed any kind of satisfying award system to help mark the passage of time and create a kind of historical record for who the best players were in a given season. All we really have is one trophy, the Ballon d’Or, and that won’t be handed out until late October.

However, changes made a couple of years ago now limit the performance period for the award to the previous season — rather than the entire calendar year, as it was in the past. Argentina beating Colombia early in the morning of Monday, July 15, in Miami put a period on all of the 2024 Ballon d’Or arguments. So, with all of the games in the books: Who is going to win soccer’s most prestigious individual award? And who should win it?

First: Could Messi win the 2024 Ballon d’Or?

The problem with predicting the Ballon d’Or winner is that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo ruined it for everyone. Since 2008, Ronaldo has won the award five times, and Messi eight times. Across soccer’s modern era, one of the same two people has won the Ballon d’Or in 13 of the past 15 years.

I’ve crunched the numbers, ran some regressions, derived some insights powered by artificial intelligence, and come to the conclusion that the biggest influencing factor over whether or not someone wins the Ballon d’Or is whether or not their name is Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi.

Of course, it’s unlikely that either of them wins it this year. With Ronaldo, who scored zero goals at the Euros despite starting every match for Portugal, there’s no chance. With Messi, there’s a tiny chance. The award is now voted on by a pool of 100 journalists representing the top 100 countries in the FIFA rankings. They’re given a shortlist of 30 players by France Football and then asked to rank their top five: No. 1 gets six points, No. 2 gets four, No. 3 gets three, No. 4 gets two, and No. 5 gets one. Add up all the points, and the guy with the most is the winner.

Messi is, by far, the most popular soccer player in contention for this year’s award, and his team did just win its second straight Copa America. In fact, Argentina became only the second European or South American country to win two straight continental titles with a World Cup in between.

From a results perspective, the two greatest national teams of all time are Spain from 2008 through 2012 and this iteration of Argentina. Messi is as famous as the pope, he’s the reigning Ballon d’Or winner, and he’s the captain of the national team that just capped off arguably the greatest four-year run we’ve ever seen.

Would it really surprise you if that sways enough voters to give the award to Messi? I don’t think it’ll happen — he has been in MLS for a full year now and was injured for most of the Copa América — but since there’s no clear front-runner, I could see a world where a bunch of the favorites split the vote and somehow Messi ekes out just enough points to win his record-extending ninth award.

Who will win the 2024 Ballon d’Or?

While Messi and Ronaldo warped the top of the ballot, there’s still some information to be gleaned from what the standings looked like below them. If we look at only the years where there were international tournaments since 2008, there’s a clear trend that will shock no one who has paid any attention to all of this: players on winning national teams get a massive boost.

In 2008, Ronaldo and Messi were top two, but then the next three players (Liverpool’s Fernando Torres, Real Madrid’s Iker Casillas and Barcelona’s Xavi) were all members of the Spanish team that won the Euros. Sixth was Zenit St Petersburg’s Andrey Arshavin, who still hadn’t moved to Arsenal but had a breakout performance at the Euros for Russia.

In 2010, Messi won the award, but the next two were Andres Iniesta and Xavi — World Cup winners — and then fourth and fifth were Wesley Sneijder, whose Dutch team finished second, and Diego Forlan, whose Uruguay team finished fourth. Four other Spanish players finished in the top 11.

In 2012, Messi won again and Ronaldo finished second, but Xavi, Iniesta and Casillas once again all finished top six after Spain’s Euro victory.

In 2014, Ronaldo won and Messi finished second, but World Cup-winning goalkeeper Manuel Neuer finished third, while fellow German stars Thomas Müller, Phillip Lahm, and Toni Kroos all finished top 10. Monaco and Real Madrid’s James Rodríguez also finished eighth — largely on the back of his performance for Colombia at the World Cup.

In 2016, Ronaldo’s Portugal won the Euros and he won the Ballon d’Or, while Portugal’s goalkeeper, Rui Patrício, landed 12th in the voting. He got more votes than Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Kevin De Bruyne, Paul Pogba, Toni Kroos, Luka Modric, and Robert Lewandowski — just to name a few.

In 2018, Modric broke the Messi-Ronaldo duopoly mostly because of Croatia’s run to the final of the World Cup, combined with Real Madrid’s Champions League title. Modric played fewer than 2,000 minutes in LaLiga as Madrid slumped to a third-place finish. World Cup winners France had two players in the top five (Antoine Griezmann and Kylian Mbappé), another in the top 10 (Raphaël Varane) and two more in the top 15 (N’Golo Kanté and Paul Pogba).

In 2021, Messi won the award, controversially beating out Lewandowski after winning his first senior international trophy with Argentina at the Copa America. The most shocking result, however, was Jorginho — arguably the third-best midfielder on both his national and club teams — finishing third overall in Ballon d’Or voting after winning the Champions League with Chelsea and the Euros with Italy.

And then last year, of course, Messi won the award after moving to MLS largely because he was the best player at the World Cup for the team that won the World Cup.

So … what does it all mean?

Mainly, that some combination of Spain (Euro 2024 winner), Argentina (Copa America 2024 winner) and maybe Colombia (Copa America 2024 runner-up) and England (Euro 2024 runner-up) will have more players receiving votes than they otherwise would’ve in a season without a summer of major international tournaments. And if there were a standout performer for either Spain or Argentina who also plays for Real Madrid, then he might be the favorite for this award.

No Argentines play for Real Madrid, while the only members of Spain’s Euro-winning side from Madrid were Joselu, Nacho Fernandez and Dani Carvajal. Joselu rarely played for either side, and although Nacho was in and out of the lineups for both club and country, he’ll probably nab a couple of down-ballot votes.

This is going to sound absurd, but there’s an outside shot that Dani Carvajal wins the Ballon d’Or. He scored Real Madrid’s winning goal against Dortmund and went the full 90 against England in the final of the Euros. If Jorginho could finish third in a year where there were two superstar candidates in Messi and Lewandowski, the 32-year-old Madrid full-back could sneak into the top slot in a season with no obvious choice at the top of the ballot.

Lautaro Martínez was the leading scorer at the Copa América, scored the winning goal in the final, and also led Serie A in goals for a truly dominant Inter Milan side. The fact that he didn’t start for his national team and that Inter were eliminated in the round of 16 for the Champions League will probably sink his Ballon d’Or prospects, but he’ll likely land somewhere in the top 10.

Oddsmakers’ favorites for the award, though, are Vinícius Júnior, Jude Bellingham and Rodri. Vini entered the summer as the favorite after leading Real Madrid to a LaLiga and Champions League double, but then he picked up a silly yellow-card suspension in Brazil’s final group-stage match against Colombia and didn’t play as Brazil were eliminated from the Copa América in penalties by Uruguay.

Bellingham was the favorite midway through last season, when he seemingly scored with every touch he took. But he cooled off in the second half of the season and was quite poor at the Euros. The [waves hands vaguely] vibes around Bellingham also seem to be at an all-time low. At the same time, England did make the final, he did assist the tying goal in the final, and he, uh, scored a bicycle kick in injury time to keep England alive in the round of 16:

Lastly, there’s Rodri. Manchester City only — “only” — won one trophy this season, the Premier League, for a record fourth straight campaign. They were eliminated by Real Madrid in the quarters of the Champions League and also lost the FA Cup final to … [checks notes] … Manchester United? But his Spain side won the Euros with a record number of goals and became the first team in the history of the tournament to win all seven games it played. He went off injured at halftime of the final but still won Player of the Tournament.

The main impediment for Rodri’s Ballon d’Or candidacy is simply that he’s not famous. Vini has 9-plus-million Twitter followers. Bellingham has over 2 million. And Rodri? Well, he doesn’t even have a Twitter account.

Who should win the Ballon d’Or?

In the past, one of the voting criteria for the award was the player’s career. In other words, your past seasons were also supposed to play a role in whether or not you won the trophy for a given year. This helps explain why Messi and Ronaldo always won and maybe also why Modric took home the trophy in 2018. But after Messi’s win in 2021, France Football removed that part of the criteria from the voting process. Instead, the criteria are, in order of importance: individual performance, then team performance, and then sportsmanship/fair play/whatever that means.

I’m going to ignore the last one since it’s unclear how much it’s supposed to matter or what “fair play” actually is supposed to represent. A recent winner was found guilty of helping blackmail a teammate with a sex tape just months before receiving the award, so I’m not sure this criteria is accounted for at all.

Where were we? Oh yeah: based on the first two criteria, Rodri would be my pick to win it all. He’s the best player on what I view as the best club team in the world, and he’s the best player on the best national team in Europe. The choice is pretty simple.

He’s a stunningly good ball-winning midfielder. He’s unstoppable in the air. He’s a truly elite ball-progressor. He never loses possession. Oh, and he also scores a bunch of goals. Most star players can do one or two of those things — Rodri does all of those things. There are a lot of aspects of midfield play that are hard to quantify, but Rodri really does make it easy to identify greatness.

We see it in his individual performances. Since 2017-18, across Europe’s Big Five leagues, there is one player who scored at least eight goals, registered at least nine assists, completed at least 300 progressive passes, and made at least 90 tackles+interceptions. It’s Rodri, this past year.

And we see it in his effect on his team’s performance. With Rodri on the field this past season in the Premier League, Manchester City outscored their opponents by 61 goals. With him off the field — nearly 500 minutes of game time — their goal difference was just plus-1. When you look at expected goals, there’s a similarly massive gap in Man City’s performance levels with Rodri on the field and off the field.

The writer Michael Lewis famously referred to former NBA player Shane Battier as the “No Stats All-Star” because of how much better his teams performed when he was on the court despite his relatively meager statistical output. That’s Rodri — except if he also had the statistical output of Giannis Antetokounmpo.