Winners of the FIFA Best men's player award 2016-2026

A Decade of The Best FIFA Men's Player Winners

When FIFA launched The Best FIFA Men's Player award in 2016, after ending its joint Ballon d'Or partnership with France Football, it inherited a sport still defined by two players. Cristiano Ronaldo won the first two editions, in 2016 and 2017, before Luka Modric broke the Messi-Ronaldo duopoly in 2018. Lionel Messi then took the 2019 award and went on to win three in total, the most of any player, adding victories in 2022 and 2023. The clubs that employed these winners feature heavily in our most FIFA Club World Cup titles by club analysis, where the same European powers recur, a reflection of how individual and team success cluster at the top of the game. The award has always rewarded the players at football's commercial and competitive summit.

The award's later years brought fresh names. Robert Lewandowski claimed back-to-back honours in 2020 and 2021 for his record-breaking scoring at Bayern Munich; Real Madrid's Vinicius Junior won in 2024 as the youngest recipient at 24; and Ousmane Dembele of Paris Saint-Germain took the 2025 prize. In all, six different players have won the ten editions to 2025, drawn from six nations. The governing body behind the award, its members and its finances, is profiled in our FIFA statistics and facts overview, the same organisation whose tournaments these players have illuminated. Six winners in ten years is a tighter field than the era's depth of talent might suggest.

The ranking still bears the imprint of the Messi-Ronaldo era that preceded it. Between them the two superstars won four of the first seven editions, and only Modric's 2018 victory interrupted their hold until Lewandowski's pandemic-season dominance. Messi's three wins, spread across spells at Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain and Inter Miami, make him the only player to claim the award on three different continents' club football, a feat that mirrors the longevity captured in our players with the most FIFA World Cup matches analysis. The award has, in effect, documented the long twilight of football's defining rivalry alongside the rise of its successors. The transition, when it came, was swift.

More recent winners signal a generational shift. Vinicius Junior and Ousmane Dembele, both born in the 2000s, represent the first post-Messi-Ronaldo recipients, and their victories coincided with the two superstars finally ceding the game's individual spotlight. The 2022 award carried particular weight, decided after Messi captained Argentina to the World Cup title examined in our number of World Cup titles won by country since 1930 analysis, the first edition to fall within a men's World Cup voting window. This report works through the full winners list, the breakdowns by nation, club, age and position, the contrast with the Ballon d'Or, and the patterns of a decade-defining award. Each chart isolates one dimension of who has won and why.

The award's origins explain some of its character. For two decades FIFA had jointly run the Ballon d'Or with the magazine France Football, but the partnership ended in 2016, and each body launched its own player-of-the-year prize. The Best FIFA Men's Player inherited FIFA's global voting infrastructure, including national team coaches and captains from every member association, giving it a uniquely international electorate. That breadth distinguishes it from the more journalist-driven Ballon d'Or, and it helps explain why the two awards, despite sharing most winners, occasionally diverge. The split also revived memories of FIFA's earlier World Player of the Year, run separately from 1991 to 2009, which the new award effectively succeeded. The lineage of FIFA's individual honours stretches back more than three decades.

Ronaldo's two opening wins captured a player at the absolute peak of his powers. The 2016 award followed a season in which he won the Champions League with Real Madrid and the European Championship with Portugal, the latter a first major international trophy for his country. The 2017 repeat came after another Champions League triumph and a La Liga title, cementing a period of dominance that few players have matched. By the time Modric interrupted the Messi-Ronaldo monopoly in 2018, the two had shared the game's top individual honours for the better part of a decade, a duopoly the new award inherited rather than created.

Lewandowski's back-to-back wins told a different story, that of a pure goalscorer finally receiving his due. The Pole had been overlooked during the Messi-Ronaldo years despite prolific scoring, and his 2020 award, after a treble-winning season at Bayern Munich crowned by a Champions League title, was widely seen as overdue recognition. His 2021 repeat followed a Bundesliga campaign in which he broke Gerd Muller's longstanding single-season scoring record. That the award arrived only once the established superstars had momentarily faltered underlined how high the bar had been set.

Every Winner, Year by Year

The year-by-year list reveals the award's distinct phases. The opening trio of editions stayed with Real Madrid, through Ronaldo and Modric, mirroring the club's Champions League dominance of the era. The middle years split between Messi and Lewandowski, two contrasting embodiments of attacking excellence. The closing seasons mark a clean break, with Vinicius and Dembele representing a new generation and, in Dembele's case, the first French winner. Messi's three victories are highlighted across three different clubs, an unusual spread that underlines how his individual brilliance travelled with him from Spain to France to the United States, even as the teams around him changed completely. No other recipient comes close to that geographic range.

Winners by Nation

Grouped by country, the award has a clear leader. Argentina tops the list with three wins, all Messi's, ahead of Portugal and Poland with two each through Ronaldo and Lewandowski. Croatia, Brazil and France complete the list with one apiece, via Modric, Vinicius and Dembele. Six nations in ten editions is a relatively concentrated spread, reflecting how the award has clustered around a small number of generational talents rather than rotating widely. The same pattern of national dominance appears in the team game, as our win probability of FIFA World Cup teams analysis shows, where a handful of footballing powers dominate the odds. Notably, three of the six winning nations have also won the men's World Cup.

Winners by Club

Counting the club each winner represented at the time, Real Madrid leads with three winning seasons: Ronaldo's two and Vinicius Junior's one. Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain follow with two each, the latter through Messi in 2022 and Dembele in 2025, while Barcelona and Inter Miami account for one apiece, both Messi's. The spread shows how the award follows individual brilliance rather than any single club dynasty, though Europe's elite clubs naturally dominate. Inter Miami's presence is the outlier, marking Messi's 2023 win as the first for a player outside a major European league. The financial weight of these clubs is reflected in the revenue flows charted in our revenue of the football association FIFA analysis of the wider game. Wealth and individual recognition, the data suggests, travel together. The richest clubs reliably employ the award's contenders. That alignment of money and merit shows no sign of weakening. Football's financial pyramid and its honours pyramid are, increasingly, the same shape.

Inside Messi's Record Three Wins

Lionel Messi's three victories are unique in their variety. He won the 2019 award at Barcelona after a season of 50-plus goals, the 2022 edition at Paris Saint-Germain in the immediate aftermath of captaining Argentina to the World Cup, and the 2023 prize while at Inter Miami in Major League Soccer, the first winner based outside Europe's major leagues. No other player has won the award representing three different clubs, let alone on two continents. His 2022 win, in particular, cemented a career-defining year that also features in our prize money distribution at the Qatar World Cup analysis, where Argentina's triumph reshaped the sport's individual honours. Messi's spread of wins captures both his longevity and the global arc of his late career. Three clubs, two continents, one player: the spread is unprecedented. No future winner is likely to match that particular record soon. Geography, as much as ability, made Messi's three wins singular. The record may stand untouched for a generation.

Single-Win and Repeat Winners

Splitting the six winners by frequency shows an even divide. Three players have won the award more than once, Messi three times and Ronaldo and Lewandowski twice each, while three have won exactly once: Modric, Vinicius Junior and Dembele. The repeat winners between them account for seven of the ten editions, a sign of how the award concentrated around dominant individuals for much of its first decade. The single-win recipients tend to mark turning points, Modric ending the duopoly in 2018, Vinicius opening the post-Ronaldo-Messi era in 2024. The career arcs behind such peaks echo the team-strength themes in our world ranking of national soccer teams analysis. Whether the next decade sees similar concentration or a wider spread is among the award's open questions. The pattern of the first decade favoured the few over the many. Concentration, not rotation, has been the rule. The single-win recipients stand out precisely because they are exceptions. Each marked a moment when the established order briefly gave way.

The Ages of the Winners

Plotting each winner's age at the time of victory reveals the award's bias toward experience. Most recipients were in their early thirties, from Ronaldo at 31 in 2016 to Messi at 36 for his 2023 win, the oldest in the award's history. Vinicius Junior broke the pattern as the youngest winner at 24 in 2024, and Dembele followed at 28, hinting at a generational handover. The cluster of thirty-something winners reflects how the award rewards sustained, peak-level achievement rather than youthful promise, much as the records in our all-time standings of national soccer teams at the World Cup analysis favour established excellence. The recent dip in winners' ages may signal the arrival of a younger cohort at the summit of the game.

Vinicius Junior's 2024 win marked the clearest generational break. At 24, the Brazilian became the youngest winner, rewarded for a season in which he was decisive in Real Madrid's Champions League triumph, and his victory came in the same year he was controversially overlooked for the Ballon d'Or, won by Manchester City's Rodri. The divergence sparked a Real Madrid boycott of the rival ceremony and a wider debate about how the two awards weigh different qualities. For The Best, the choice signalled a willingness to crown the post-Ronaldo-Messi generation, confirmed when Dembele took the 2025 prize.

Ousmane Dembele's 2025 award capped one of football's more unexpected career arcs. Long regarded as a player of immense talent but inconsistent output, the Frenchman produced the most complete season of his career at Paris Saint-Germain, central to the club's long-awaited Champions League breakthrough. His victory made him the first French winner of The Best, and the second consecutive recipient born in the 2000s, confirming the generational handover that Vinicius had begun. That two such different players, a Real Madrid winger and a PSG forward, took the most recent awards suggested the post-superstar era would be more open and less predictable than the decade of duopoly that preceded it.

Forwards Dominate the Award

By playing position, the award tilts heavily toward attackers. Eight of the ten winning seasons went to forwards, Ronaldo, Messi, Lewandowski, Vinicius and Dembele, with only Modric's 2018 midfield triumph breaking the pattern, and even that owed much to his role in Croatia's run to the World Cup final. No defender or goalkeeper has ever won, a reflection of how individual awards reward visible, goal-scoring contributions over the subtler work of defence. The same attacking bias shapes the scoring records analysed in our FIFA World Cup winners prize money coverage, where forwards dominate the headlines. The award's structure, voted on partly by fans, naturally favours the players whose impact is easiest to see. Goals, not tackles, win individual prizes.

The voting system itself shapes the outcomes in subtle ways. By giving fans a full quarter of the vote alongside coaches, captains and media, FIFA built in a bias toward globally popular, high-profile players, which helps explain the dominance of forwards and household names. Captains and coaches, voting from every member association, add an international breadth that can reward World Cup performances heavily, as the 2022 result showed. Media votes lean toward sustained club excellence across a season. The blend produces winners who combine team success, individual statistics and global visibility, a formula that has favoured the era's biggest stars and made surprise winners rare.

The Best Versus the Ballon d'Or

Because FIFA and France Football split in 2016, two competing player-of-the-year awards now coexist, and they do not always agree. In most years the same player won both, but the awards have diverged notably, most strikingly in 2024 when Vinicius Junior took The Best while Spain's Rodri won the Ballon d'Or, prompting a Real Madrid boycott of the latter ceremony. The two honours use different voting periods and electorates, FIFA's split equally between coaches, captains, media and fans. The institutional structures that govern such recognition sit within the wider football economy that frames the modern game. For most of the decade, though, the two awards have reinforced rather than contradicted each other, sharing the era's dominant names. Divergence, when it comes, tends to make headlines.

Comparing the award's first decade with the FIFA World Player of the Year that preceded it is instructive. That earlier honour, run from 1991 to 2009, was dominated by a rotating cast including Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldinho and the young Messi, and it too favoured attacking players from elite European clubs. The continuity suggests the criteria for footballing greatness, as measured by FIFA's electorate, have remained remarkably stable across three decades, even as the specific names changed. What has shifted is the proliferation of competing awards, which now divide the recognition that earlier generations of stars held more or less uncontested.

A Decade of Editions

The cumulative count of editions frames how young this award still is. From its first presentation in 2016, The Best FIFA Men's Player has been awarded every year, reaching three editions by 2018, five by 2020, seven by 2022, nine by 2024 and ten by 2025. In just a decade it has become the sport's most prestigious individual honour alongside the Ballon d'Or. The schedule of FIFA's broader calendar of events and ceremonies is detailed in our matches at FIFA World Cups by city and country analysis. With the 2026 award still to be presented at the time of writing, the current tally of six different winners across ten editions stands as the complete record of the award's first decade. A tenth edition in a decade is a remarkable consistency for so young an honour. Each December ceremony has added another name to the list. The roll of honour grows by one with every passing season. In a decade it has become an indispensable part of the football calendar.

One structural fact underlines how concentrated the award has been at the top of the European game. Eight of the ten winning seasons came while the player was at a club in one of Europe's major leagues, and only Messi's 2023 season at Inter Miami and, arguably, the wider context of his late career fall outside that pattern. The dominance of European club football in the award mirrors the scoring hierarchy tracked in our leading scorers at the FIFA World Cup analysis, where the same elite recurs. Whether a player based wholly outside Europe can win the award again, as Messi did, may depend on how quickly leagues elsewhere close the competitive gap. For now, the European game remains the award's near-exclusive stage.

The award also reflects the changing geography of elite football. For its first seven years every winner played in Europe's traditional big-five leagues, but Messi's 2023 move to Inter Miami, and his subsequent award, signalled that talent and recognition were beginning to disperse, however slowly. The expansion of competitions like the Club World Cup, the rise of well-funded leagues in Saudi Arabia and the United States, and the growing global television market all point toward a future in which the award's winners may come from a wider range of leagues. For now, though, Europe's concentration of wealth and competition keeps the vast majority of contenders, and winners, within its borders.

Taken together, the winners' list tells the story of football's individual honours through a decade of transition. Lionel Messi's three victories, spread across three clubs on two continents, lead a roll of six winners that still bears the deep imprint of his rivalry with Cristiano Ronaldo, who took the award's first two editions. Robert Lewandowski's back-to-back wins, Luka Modric's duopoly-breaking 2018, and the recent victories of Vinicius Junior and Ousmane Dembele chart the slow handover from one footballing generation to the next. Forwards have dominated, the early-thirties peak has defined most winners, and Europe's elite clubs have supplied all but one. The open questions for the award's second decade are whether any player can approach Messi's three, whether the post-Ronaldo-Messi generation will produce its own multiple winner, and whether the diverging verdicts of The Best and the Ballon d'Or, as in 2024, become more common as the game's individual honours multiply.

Looking ahead to the award's second decade, several questions stand out. No active player appears positioned to challenge Messi's three wins in the near term, since the post-superstar generation has so far produced only single winners. The expanded international calendar, with a 48-team World Cup in 2026 and the enlarged Club World Cup, gives emerging stars more high-profile stages on which to build a case. And the growing divergence between The Best and the Ballon d'Or, sharpest in 2024, raises the prospect of the two awards regularly crowning different players, complicating the simple notion of a single world's-best footballer. The next ten editions will test whether the concentration of the first decade was a product of the Messi-Ronaldo era or a permanent feature of how football honours its greatest individuals. Either way, the first decade has set a high bar for the names that follow.

For all the data and debate, the award ultimately tells a simple story. In a decade, six players rose above the rest of world football to be named its single best, and the names on that short list, Messi, Ronaldo, Lewandowski, Modric, Vinicius and Dembele, read as a fair summary of the era's defining talents. That the list is short, and weighted toward a handful of nations and clubs, reflects not a flaw in the voting but the genuine concentration of the very highest level of the game. The award has, in its first decade, done its job: it has recorded who stood at the absolute summit, year by year.

Frequently Asked Questions: Best FIFA Men's Player Winners