Winners of the FIFA best goal award 2009-2026

Winners of the FIFA Puskás Award from 2009 to 2026, by year

The FIFA Puskas Award occupies a unique place among football's individual honours. While the player-of-the-year prizes reward sustained brilliance and tend to recur among a few dominant names, the Puskas Award celebrates a single moment, the most beautiful goal of the year, and has gone to a different player in each of its 16 editions from 2009 to 2024. Cristiano Ronaldo won the inaugural award for a long-range strike against Porto, and Manchester United's Alejandro Garnacho took the most recent for an overhead kick against Everton. The award sits within the same ceremony as the player honours profiled in our winners of The Best FIFA Men's Player award analysis, yet rewards something entirely different. Where one honour measures a year's work, the other captures a single, unrepeatable instant.

What makes the winners' list so distinctive is its democracy. Alongside superstars such as Ronaldo, Neymar and Zlatan Ibrahimovic sit players from the margins of the global game: Wendell Lira, a Brazilian second-division striker; Mohd Faiz Subri of Malaysia; Daniel Zsori of Hungary; and Marcin Oleksy, the first amputee footballer to win, for a volley in Poland's amputee league. The award judges only the goal, not the scorer's fame, a principle that distinguishes it from every other honour at the ceremony covered in our winners of The Best FIFA Women's Player award analysis. The governing body behind it is profiled in our FIFA statistics and facts overview. The contrast between the two kinds of award could hardly be sharper.

Because every edition has produced a new winner, the most meaningful patterns emerge not from individuals but from nations, goal types and competitions. By country, Brazil leads narrowly with two winners, Neymar in 2011 and Guilherme Madruga in 2023, while ten other nations have one each, from Portugal and Sweden to Malaysia and South Korea. The geographic spread is far wider than the player awards, which cluster among Europe's elite as our most FIFA Club World Cup titles by club analysis shows. The Puskas Award, judging beauty rather than dominance, reaches corners of the game the other honours never touch. A wonder goal, in this competition, needs no famous name attached to it.

The award's origins lie in a desire to celebrate beauty for its own sake. FIFA created it in 2009, naming it after Ferenc Puskas, the Hungarian and Real Madrid forward who scored a then-record 84 goals in 85 internationals and was named the greatest top-division scorer of the twentieth century. The choice of namesake signalled the award's purpose: to honour artistry and audacity rather than mere effectiveness. Unlike the player awards, which weigh trophies, statistics and team success, the Puskas Award asks only one question of each goal, whether it was beautiful, a deliberately narrow and joyful criterion that has produced one of football's most beloved annual moments.

The award has also evolved in scope. From 2009 to 2023 it was open to goals by both men and women, though no woman ever won it; in 2024 FIFA created a separate Marta Award for women's goals and the Puskas became exclusively for men. The voting method changed too, after Mohamed Salah's contested 2018 win, from a pure public vote to a system where fans pick three finalists and a FIFA panel decides. These shifts reflect the broader professionalisation of FIFA's awards, set against the organisation's finances in our revenue of the football association FIFA analysis. This report works through the winners by year, nation, confederation, goal type and competition, and the curious absence of Lionel Messi from the list. Each pattern reveals something the player awards cannot.

Every Puskás Award Winner, Year by Year

The year-by-year list is a roll call of football's most memorable strikes. Several have entered the sport's collective memory: Ibrahimovic's 2013 overhead kick from 30 metres against England, James Rodriguez's chest-and-volley at the 2014 World Cup, and Son Heung-min's 2020 solo run from inside his own half. Others belong to players whose careers never reached the top tier, a testament to the award's reach. The list also shows Tottenham as the only club to win in consecutive years, through Son in 2020 and Erik Lamela's rabona against Arsenal in 2021. No nation, club or player has dominated, making this the most evenly distributed of all FIFA's honours and a genuine celebration of the goal above the goalscorer. The trophy belongs to the strike, not the striker.

Winners by Nation

Even the nation breakdown is strikingly flat. Brazil leads with just two winners, Neymar and Madruga, and is followed by a long list of single-winner countries spanning every continent that plays the game: Portugal, Turkey, Slovakia, Sweden, Colombia, Malaysia, France, Egypt, Hungary, South Korea, Argentina and Poland. The presence of Malaysia, Hungary and Slovakia alongside footballing giants underlines how the award rewards the goal rather than the pedigree of the scorer or their country. This stands in sharp contrast to the national-team honours tracked in our number of World Cup titles won by country since 1930 analysis, where a handful of nations monopolise success. The Puskas Award is football's great leveller. No other honour in the sport reaches so many flags.

Winners by Confederation

Grouped by confederation, the award leans European but reaches further than most. UEFA nations account for eleven of the sixteen winners, reflecting the continent's concentration of elite leagues and broadcast coverage, but CONMEBOL has supplied three through Brazil and Argentina, and the AFC one through Malaysia's Faiz Subri, with the remaining winner from elsewhere. No African-born winner has emerged, though Egypt's Mohamed Salah, who plays in Europe, is sometimes counted for his nation. The breadth still far exceeds the club game's European dominance shown in our FIFA World Cup teams by confederation analysis. A spectacular goal, the award suggests, can come from any league on earth. The map of winners is wider than that of any other football prize.

The voting controversy of 2018 reshaped how the winner is chosen. For its first decade the award was decided entirely by public vote, but when Mohamed Salah won that year for a relatively modest goal in the Merseyside derby, ahead of Cristiano Ronaldo's spectacular overhead kick against Juventus, many felt popularity had trumped merit. FIFA responded by changing the format so that the public now selects three finalists from whom a panel of experts chooses the winner, balancing fan engagement against informed judgement. The episode highlighted the tension at the heart of any beauty contest, that spectacle and popularity do not always align.

The Goals That Win

Classifying the winning goals by type reveals what the voters and panels reward. Spectacular long-range volleys form the largest group, the category that includes Stoch, Ibrahimovic, James Rodriguez and Garnacho's overhead efforts, while overhead and bicycle kicks are a close second, a staple of the award since Ronaldo's first win. Solo runs, such as Son's against Burnley, and audacious improvisations like Lamela's rabona round out the list. What unites them is difficulty and rarity: the award almost never goes to a tap-in or a simple finish, however important. The technical excellence celebrated here contrasts with the volume scoring tracked in our leading scorers at the FIFA World Cup analysis, where consistency rather than spectacle wins honours. Beauty, not reliability, is the only currency here.

The 2024 creation of the Marta Award marked the most significant structural change in the award's history. For its first 15 editions the Puskas was open to goals by players of any gender, yet no woman ever won it, despite several memorable nominations. Rather than continue a single award that had only ever crowned men, FIFA established a parallel honour named after Brazil's Marta, the women's game's greatest scorer, to recognise the goal of the year in women's football. The Puskas Award became men-only from 2024. The change drew both praise, for guaranteeing women's goals their own spotlight, and criticism, for ending a shared award that had nominally treated all goals equally.

Where the Goals Were Scored

The competitions behind the winning goals are as varied as the players. Most were scored in domestic league matches, from the Premier League to the Malaysian and Polish leagues, underlining that the award looks beyond the elite competitions. A handful came in international fixtures, including Altintop's 2010 strike for Turkey and Ibrahimovic's 2013 effort, and two of the most celebrated were scored at the World Cup itself, James Rodriguez's 2014 volley chief among them. The global stage of that tournament is examined in our 2026 FIFA World Cup analysis. That a Brazilian second-division goal and a World Cup strike can win the same award in different years captures its essential openness. The pitch, not the prestige, decides who wins.

The Messi and Ronaldo Paradox

The award's relationship with football's two defining stars is one of its quirks. Cristiano Ronaldo won the very first edition in 2009 and has been nominated only once more since, finishing second in 2018. Lionel Messi, astonishingly, has never won despite being nominated seven times, more than any other player, with a best finish of second in 2019. That the two players who dominated the player-of-the-year awards for over a decade, as our players with the most FIFA World Cup matches analysis records, could not monopolise the goal award too speaks to its different character. The Puskas rewards a single moment of magic, something even the greatest accumulators of brilliance cannot manufacture on demand. Genius of the moment is a different gift from genius of the season.

There is a deeper point in the award's resistance to repeat winners. Player-of-the-year prizes reward the players who most reliably produce excellence, which is why a few names dominate them for years. A single moment of magic, by contrast, is almost by definition unrepeatable; the conditions that produce a wonder goal, the angle, the improvisation, the split-second decision, cannot be summoned at will even by the world's best. That is why sixteen editions have produced sixteen winners, and why a player like Lionel Messi, who has scored countless brilliant goals, has never timed one perfectly enough in a given year to win. The award measures luck and inspiration as much as ability. That blend is exactly what keeps it unpredictable.

The voting controversy also points to a broader debate about how beauty should be judged. Some argue the award should reward pure technical difficulty, favouring the overhead kicks and long-range volleys that dominate the list; others believe context matters, that a goal's importance, timing or improbability adds to its beauty. The shift to a hybrid public-and-panel system was an attempt to balance these views, letting fans express enthusiasm while experts weigh craft. Yet every edition reignites the argument, since beauty in football, as in art, resists objective measurement. That irresolvable subjectivity is part of the award's appeal, generating debate that the more clear-cut player awards rarely provoke. Argument, in this case, is a feature rather than a flaw.

The Ages of the Winners

Unlike the player awards, which favour established stars in their peak years, the Puskas Award spreads across ages because a single goal can come at any career stage. Neymar was 19 when he won in 2011 and Garnacho 20 in 2024, while veterans like Ibrahimovic and Giroud won in their thirties. The age of the winner reflects only when they happened to score something extraordinary, not a body of work, which is why teenagers and veterans appear side by side. This contrasts with the experience-weighted pattern in our all-time standings of national soccer teams at the World Cup analysis, where longevity is the qualifying trait. A moment of genius, the Puskas list shows, respects no age bracket. The youngest and oldest winners are separated by more than a decade of life.

Superstars and Unknowns Side by Side

Perhaps the award's most charming feature is how it places household names beside players who would otherwise never feature in a global ceremony. Roughly half the winners were established stars at the time, Ronaldo, Neymar, Ibrahimovic, James Rodriguez, Giroud, Salah and Son, while the other half were relative unknowns, from Wendell Lira, who retired soon after to become a professional gamer, to Marcin Oleksy of the amputee league. The award gave each a moment on football's biggest stage. That mix is unique among the honours described in our Women's World Cup title winners analysis, which by design reward only the elite. The Puskas Award alone can turn an unknown into a global name for a night. For some winners, that night remained the peak of their public fame.

The geography of the winners tells a story of football's global spread. While Europe's leagues, with their cameras on every match, naturally capture more candidate goals, the award's reach into Malaysia, Hungary, Slovakia and the Polish amputee league shows how a spectacular strike can travel from any corner of the game to the sport's biggest stage. Daniel Zsori's 2019 winner came in the Hungarian league for Debrecen; Mohd Faiz Subri's 2016 goal, a swerving free kick defying physics, was scored in Malaysia. The award's willingness to look beyond the elite competitions, even when broadcast coverage is thin, is precisely what gives it a character no other football honour shares.

For all its quirks, the award has succeeded in its core purpose: keeping the spectacular goal at the centre of football's conversation. In an era increasingly focused on data, expected goals and tactical systems, the Puskas Award is an annual reminder that football remains, at its heart, a game capable of producing moments of pure artistry that no statistic can capture. Each December, the shortlist prompts millions of fans to relive the year's most breathtaking strikes, and the winner joins a roll of honour defined not by fame or trophies but by a single instant of genius. It is, in that sense, the most romantic of all the sport's prizes. No other award asks so little of a career and so much of a single kick.

Looking ahead, the men-only format raises a quiet question about what the award will become. With women's goals now honoured separately through the Marta Award, the Puskas competition will draw from a narrower pool, though one still spanning every men's league on earth. Whether the change sharpens the contest or removes some of the variety that made the award special remains to be seen, since several of the most memorable nominations in its open era came from the women's game. What seems certain is that the award's essential character, rewarding a single moment of brilliance from anywhere in the world, will endure, and that some unheralded player will continue to earn a place alongside the icons each year. The next wonder goal, wherever it is scored, is already waiting to be found.

Several winning goals have become cultural touchstones beyond football. James Rodriguez's 2014 volley, scored at the World Cup and watched by a global television audience, helped earn him a move to Real Madrid within weeks. Wendell Lira's 2015 win turned a little-known Brazilian striker into a brief global celebrity; he retired from football soon after and became a professional video gamer, an arc unimaginable for any other award winner. Marcin Oleksy's 2022 triumph brought worldwide attention to amputee football. These stories illustrate how a single goal can change a life, and why the award holds a special place in the sport's affections. Few honours in any sport carry such human stories.

A Decade and a Half of Editions

The cumulative count of editions shows the award's steady history. From its first presentation in 2009, the Puskas Award has been given every year, reaching four editions by 2012, seven by 2015, ten by 2018, thirteen by 2021 and sixteen by 2024. In a decade and a half it has produced sixteen winners and sixteen unforgettable goals, with the 2024 split into separate men's and women's awards marking its biggest structural change. The schedule of FIFA's wider calendar of ceremonies has grown steadily over the years. With the 2025 winner still to be announced at the time of writing, the run of sixteen different winners stands as one of the most egalitarian records in the sport.

One small exception to the no-repeat rule deserves a note: while no individual has won twice, a single club has supplied back-to-back winners. Tottenham Hotspur provided the winning goal in consecutive years through Son Heung-min in 2020 and Erik Lamela's rabona against Arsenal in 2021, the only time one club has appeared in successive editions. Every other winning goal came from a different club, reinforcing the award's resistance to dynasties of any kind. That openness mirrors the unpredictability that makes a single spectacular strike, rather than a season of consistency, the basis for this honour.

Taken together, the Puskas Award's winners list stands apart from every other honour in football. Sixteen editions have produced sixteen different winners from twelve nations across every continent, a spread no player or team award comes close to matching. The roll includes global icons like Ronaldo, Neymar and Ibrahimovic alongside an amputee footballer, a second-division striker and players from leagues rarely seen on the world stage, all united by a single moment of extraordinary skill. The award's quirks, Messi's seven nominations without a win, Tottenham's back-to-back triumphs, the 2024 split into men's and women's prizes, only add to its character. The open questions for the years ahead are whether any player will ever win it twice, whether the new men-only format changes the kind of goal that triumphs, and which unheralded player will next produce the moment of magic that earns football's most democratic prize.

It is worth dwelling on what the absence of repeat winners says about the modern game. In an era when the same elite clubs and players win nearly every team and individual honour, the Puskas Award stands almost alone in resisting concentration. A wonder goal can be scored by a teenager or a veteran, a superstar or an amateur, in a World Cup final or a second-division fixture watched by a few thousand people. That genuine unpredictability, increasingly rare in a sport shaped by money and data, is the award's quiet rebellion: a reminder that football's most memorable moments cannot be bought, planned or guaranteed, and that the next one might come from anywhere at all. In that sense the award honours not just the goal but the enduring romance of the game itself. That, more than any record, is what keeps it beloved.

Frequently Asked Questions: FIFA Puskás Award Winners