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

A Decade of The Best FIFA Women's Player Winners

When FIFA launched The Best FIFA Women's Player award in 2016, the women's game was entering a period of rapid growth, and the award's early years reflected a sport still without a single dominant force. Carli Lloyd of the United States won the first edition, followed by the Netherlands' Lieke Martens in 2017, Brazil's Marta in 2018, Lloyd's compatriot Megan Rapinoe in 2019, and England's Lucy Bronze in 2020. Five players, four nations, five seasons. The growth of the women's game that these stars drove is reflected in the prize funds charted in our Women's World Cup prize money analysis, where the same decade transformed the sport's economics. The award's history runs almost exactly parallel to that financial transformation.

From 2021, the award found a new centre of gravity. Barcelona's Alexia Putellas won in 2021 and 2022, and her clubmate Aitana Bonmati then claimed three in a row from 2023 to 2025, the first player to win the award in three consecutive years and the most decorated overall with three titles. Spanish players, all from Barcelona, have now taken five straight editions. The companion men's award follows a similar pattern of concentrated dominance, as our winners of The Best FIFA Men's Player award analysis shows, where a handful of names define the honour. The governing body behind both awards is profiled in our FIFA statistics and facts overview. Two clubs, in truth, tell most of the recent story: one in Spain, and its rivals trying to catch up.

The ranking captures a sport whose individual honours have narrowed sharply. In the award's first five years no player won twice; in its second five, just two players, both from one club, took every edition. Bonmati's three consecutive wins coincided with Spain's 2023 World Cup triumph and Barcelona's run of Champions League titles, a convergence of club and country success that few players have ever matched. The records of the women's game's longest-serving stars, several of whom feature among these winners, are tracked in our most Women's World Cup appearances analysis. The award has, in effect, charted the rise of Spain to the summit of the women's game. The individual award and the national team's ascent moved in lockstep.

The award's origins mirror those of the men's prize. For years FIFA had jointly run the Ballon d'Or with France Football, but the partnership ended in 2016, and each body launched its own honours. The Best FIFA Women's Player inherited FIFA's global voting structure, with national team coaches and captains from every member association joining media and, from late 2016, fans, each group carrying a quarter of the vote. It succeeded the FIFA Women's World Player of the Year, run from 2001 to 2015 and dominated by Brazil's Marta, who won it a record six times. The new award thus carried forward a tradition of recognising the world's best while broadening the electorate that chose her.

The contrast with the early years is striking. Marta, the women's game's all-time leading scorer and a six-time winner of the predecessor award, took just one edition of The Best, in 2018, near the end of her peak, while younger stars such as Bonmati have dominated its recent history. That generational shift mirrors the broader story of the women's game, whose 2023 World Cup, examined in our Women's World Cup title winners analysis, marked Spain's arrival as the sport's leading nation. This report works through the full winners list, the breakdowns by nation, club, age and position, and the two distinct eras the award has passed through. Each chart isolates one dimension of who has won and why.

The early winners each marked a milestone for their nations and the sport. Carli Lloyd's back-to-back recognition followed her hat-trick in the 2015 World Cup final, the United States' golden era in full flow. Lieke Martens's 2017 win, after the Netherlands' European Championship triumph on home soil, signalled the rise of the European game. Marta's 2018 award honoured the greatest scorer the women's game had produced, and Megan Rapinoe's 2019 win came after she led the United States to a second consecutive World Cup while becoming a global figure beyond football. Each victory captured a distinct chapter in the sport's rapid expansion. Five winners, five different stories, one rising sport.

Every Winner, Year by Year

The year-by-year list lays bare the award's two phases. The first five rows show a different winner each season, drawn from four nations and five clubs across three continents, a genuinely open competition reflecting a sport without a settled hierarchy. The final five rows tell the opposite story: a single club, Barcelona, and a single nation, Spain, sweeping every edition through two players. Bonmati's three consecutive wins are highlighted, an unprecedented run for the award. The transition between the eras was abrupt, with Putellas's 2021 victory marking the start of a Spanish dominance that has not yet been interrupted, and which coincided almost exactly with Spain's emergence as a World Cup-winning nation.

Winners by Nation

Grouped by country, the award has become heavily concentrated. Spain leads with five wins, all since 2021 and all through Barcelona's Putellas and Bonmati, ahead of the United States with two, via Lloyd and Rapinoe. The Netherlands, Brazil and England complete the list with one apiece, through Martens, Marta and Bronze. The spread of five nations across ten editions masks the sharp recent narrowing, with one country taking the last five awards in succession. The same Spanish ascendancy appears in the team game, as our FIFA world ranking of women's national soccer teams analysis shows, where Spain sits at or near the top. The award's national distribution has, in effect, become a proxy for the rise of Spanish women's football. No other nation has strung together anything close to five in a row.

Winners by Club

By club, the concentration is even starker. Barcelona has produced five winning seasons, Putellas's two and Bonmati's three, more than any club in either the men's or women's award. Lyon and Houston Dash account for one each, through Bronze and Lloyd, with the early winners spread across clubs in the United States, Sweden and Europe before Barcelona's rise. The club's dominance of the women's award mirrors its sustained success in the UEFA Women's Champions League and reflects the broader concentration of elite talent visible in our most FIFA Club World Cup titles by club analysis of the men's game. Barcelona's ability to assemble and retain the world's best players turned individual recognition into an almost in-house affair from 2021. The club's depth meant its players often competed mainly against each other for the prize.

Putellas's two wins launched the Barcelona dynasty. The midfielder claimed the 2021 award after a treble-winning season crowned by the club's first Women's Champions League title, and retained it in 2022 despite a serious knee injury that ruled her out of that summer's European Championship, a measure of how dominant her body of work had been. Her victories established the template that Bonmati would extend: a Barcelona midfielder, central to both club and national success, recognised as the world's best. Together the two players have given Spain and their club a stranglehold on the award that shows no sign of loosening. Barcelona's midfield, in effect, became the award's permanent address.

Inside Bonmati's Record Three Wins

Aitana Bonmati's three consecutive titles set a new standard for the award. Her 2023 win followed Spain's first Women's World Cup triumph, where she won the Golden Ball as the tournament's best player; her 2024 repeat came after another Barcelona treble and the inaugural Women's Nations League; and her 2025 victory completed the first hat-trick in the award's history. No other player, in the men's or women's edition, has won three years running. The World Cup success underpinning her first title is detailed in our Women's World Cup prize money by finish analysis, where Spain's 2023 victory reshaped the sport's honours. Bonmati's run made her the defining individual figure of the women's game's breakthrough years. Her dominance defined the moment the sport reached a new global peak.

Bonmati's three wins reframed what dominance looks like in the women's game. Where the men's award has never seen a player win three years running, Bonmati achieved it at the very moment women's football reached unprecedented global visibility, her victories broadcast to record audiences and celebrated far beyond the sport's traditional heartlands. Her style, all close control, intelligent movement and incisive passing from central midfield, also shifted the archetype of a world-best player away from the goalscorer toward the creator. That a deep-lying playmaker could win three consecutive global awards says much about how the women's game, and its voters, value the craft of midfield play more readily than the men's equivalent has tended to.

Single-Win and Repeat Winners

Splitting the seven winners by frequency captures the award's transformation. Five players won exactly once, Lloyd, Martens, Marta, Rapinoe and Bronze, all in the open first era, while two, Putellas and Bonmati, won multiple times in the Spanish era that followed. The repeat winners account for five of the ten editions despite numbering just two players, a concentration unmatched in the award's early years. The single-win recipients represent a more varied period when no player could string together dominant seasons, partly because the women's game lacked the year-round professional structures that now sustain peak performance. Those structures, funded by the rising revenues in our FIFA Women's World Cup total prize fund analysis, helped make sustained individual dominance possible. Money, in short, helped turn fleeting brilliance into lasting dynasties.

The professionalisation of the women's game underpins every trend in the award's history. The early winners largely came up through a sport still semi-professional in many countries, where even world-class players balanced football with other commitments, and where national-team success at a World Cup or Olympics was often the decisive factor in the vote. The recent winners are products of fully professional club systems, with year-round training, sports science and competitive Champions League football sharpening their performances. That shift, funded by the rising revenues transforming the women's game, explains both the younger age of recent winners and the new possibility of sustained, multi-year dominance that the early era never produced. Professional structures, more than any single player, reshaped the award.

Lucy Bronze's 2020 award was historic in its own right. The England full-back became one of very few defenders ever to win a major individual football honour, recognised for her commanding performances at Lyon, then the dominant force in European women's football. Her win, in a year disrupted by the pandemic, underlined how the women's award has been willing to reward roles that the men's prize almost never has. It also marked the last edition before the Spanish era began, a final flourish of the open period in which a defender, a winger and a veteran striker could all realistically contend for the same prize in consecutive years.

The Ages of the Winners

Plotting each winner's age reveals a shift toward younger champions. The early winners skewed older, from Carli Lloyd at 34 in 2016 to Megan Rapinoe at 34 in 2019, reflecting an era when experience and World Cup heroics drove the vote. Lieke Martens broke that pattern at 24 in 2017, and the recent Spanish winners have been younger too, with Putellas 27 at her first win and Bonmati 27 by her 2025 title. The trend toward winners in their mid-to-late twenties reflects the professionalisation of the women's game, which now develops elite players earlier, much as the longevity records in our players with the most Women's World Cup goals analysis show careers lengthening at both ends. The award increasingly rewards players entering rather than leaving their prime. The shift mirrors the professionalisation of the women's game itself.

A Balanced Spread of Positions

Unlike the men's award, which forwards have dominated, the women's prize has spread evenly across positions. Four winning seasons went to forwards, Lloyd, Marta and Rapinoe, four to midfielders, all of Putellas's and Bonmati's wins, and two to defenders through Lucy Bronze, one of the few defenders to win any major individual football award. The balance reflects how the women's game has celebrated playmakers and defenders alongside goalscorers, a contrast with the attacking bias seen in our leading scorers at the FIFA World Cup analysis of the men's game. Bonmati and Putellas, both central midfielders, helped redefine the profile of a world-best player toward control and creativity rather than pure goalscoring. The women's award has, in that sense, been more positionally democratic than the men's.

The divergence between The Best and the Women's Ballon d'Or has been smaller than in the men's game, largely because the same players have dominated both. Putellas won the Ballon d'Or in 2021 and 2022 alongside her FIFA awards, and Bonmati took the France Football prize in 2023, 2024 and 2025 to match her FIFA hat-trick. The alignment reflects how clear-cut the recent hierarchy has been: when one player so thoroughly outperforms the field, different electorates tend to reach the same conclusion. Only in the more open early years did the two awards, where both existed, occasionally honour different players, a reminder that disagreement is the product of genuine competition at the top. Agreement, paradoxically, is the mark of a settled hierarchy.

The geography of the award reflects the shifting balance of the women's game. The early winners came from the sport's established powers, the United States, with its long-dominant national team, and the European nations rising to challenge it. The recent monopoly of Spain through Barcelona tracks the broader transfer of power toward the European club game, where the best players from around the world now concentrate. Just as the men's award has rewarded players at Europe's elite clubs almost exclusively, the women's prize has followed talent to wherever the strongest professional structures exist, which for the past five years has meant Catalonia above all. The next shift in the award's geography will signal the next shift in the sport itself. Talent, in this award, has always followed the strongest leagues. Geography and quality move together in the women's game. Where the best leagues grow, the next winners will emerge.

The Open Era and the Spanish Era

The award divides almost perfectly into two five-year halves. The open era, from 2016 to 2020, produced five different winners from four nations and five clubs, a reflection of a sport with no settled hierarchy and several competing national powers. The Spanish era, from 2021 to 2025, saw Barcelona's Putellas and Bonmati win all five editions, mirroring Spain's simultaneous rise to World Cup and European glory. The shift tracks the broader balance of power reflected in our Women's World Cup top scorers of all time analysis. Whether the Spanish era continues or a new challenger emerges is the central question hanging over the award's next decade, much as the men's prize awaits a successor to its defining names. Both awards now wait to see who follows the current dynasties.

Looking ahead to the award's second decade, the central question is whether anyone can break Spain's grip. Bonmati and Putellas remain at their peak, and Barcelona's continued dominance of European competition keeps supplying contenders, but rising investment in England's Women's Super League, the United States' NWSL and elsewhere is closing the gap. A 48-team men's World Cup in 2026 and the expanding women's calendar give emerging stars more high-profile stages on which to build a case. Whether the next winner comes from outside Spain, and whether any player can match Bonmati's three consecutive titles, will be the defining storylines of the award's coming years, much as the men's prize awaits the first multiple winner of its post-superstar generation. For now, the safest bet remains another year of Barcelona dominance. The question is when, not whether, that dominance eventually ends. Every dynasty in football, however total, has ultimately given way to a successor.

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 Women'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 a single decade it has become the women's game's most prestigious individual honour alongside the Women's Ballon d'Or, introduced in 2018. The schedule of FIFA's broader calendar of events and ceremonies continues to expand each year. With the 2026 award still to be presented at the time of writing, the current tally of seven different winners across ten editions stands as the complete record of the award's first decade. Ten editions in, the honour is firmly established at the summit of the women's game.

Taken together, the winners' list tells the story of women's football's breakthrough decade through its individual honours. The open era of 2016 to 2020 spread the award across the United States, the Netherlands, Brazil and England, honouring the pioneers of a still-developing sport, before Barcelona and Spain transformed it into a near-monopoly. Aitana Bonmati's three consecutive wins, the first such run in the award's history, lead a roll of seven winners and crown a Spanish dominance built on World Cup and Champions League success. Midfielders and defenders have shared the honour more evenly than in the men's game, and the winners have grown younger as the sport has professionalised. The open questions for the award's second decade are whether any nation can break Spain's grip, whether a player can match or surpass Bonmati's three, and whether the rapid growth of the women's game produces a new generation of contenders from beyond the current elite.

For all the data, the winners' list ultimately tells a simple story of a sport coming into its own. In a single decade, seven players were named the best in the women's game, and the names, from Lloyd and Marta to Putellas and Bonmati, trace the sport's journey from a still-developing competition to a fully professional global spectacle. That the recent honours have concentrated in Spain reflects not a narrowing of the game but the emergence of a genuinely dominant team and club, the kind every maturing sport eventually produces. The award has, in its first decade, recorded both the breadth of the early years and the brilliance of the Barcelona era, a fitting chronicle of women's football's most transformative decade. The next decade will be written by names not yet on the list.

Frequently Asked Questions: Best FIFA Women's Player Winners