Reuters: Real Madrid’s France forward Karim Benzema won the 2022 Ballon d’Or award for the best men’s player in the world on Monday, while Barcelona’s Spain midfielder Alexia Putellas won the women’s award for a second time.
Karim Benzema spent much of his career as a glittering supporting act for Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo and, more recently, Kylian Mbappe.
Now, two months short of his 35th birthday, he has the trinket that marks him as a star in his own right: a Ballon d’Or.
Benzema, for months regarded as the overwhelming favorite to win the 2022 edition of the award given to the world’s best soccer player, collected his prize on Monday at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.
Sadio Mane, who led Senegal to victory in the Africa Cup of Nations, finished second, with Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne third.
Benzema had described winning one as his “dream since childhood”; he has had to wait a little longer than he might have anticipated to see it come true.
France Football, the magazine that has awarded the Ballon d’Or, the most illustrious individual prize in soccer since 1956, had announced that the voting for this year’s edition would be subject to what Pascal Ferré, the publication’s editor, referred to as a “little makeover” in order to retain its relevance and burnish its accuracy.
Rather than offering 176 journalists from around the world a vote on the final winners, only those from the top 100 nations in FIFA’s global rankings would decide the men’s award, and the top 50 the women’s prize. (Ferré, more than a little disparagingly, said this new “elite” panel represented the “real connoisseurs” of the game.)
Perhaps most significantly, the voting criteria were clarified: The magazine instructed its jurors that individual attainment over the previous season should outweigh team success, and that a player’s broader career should not be relevant at all.
Ferré hoped that measure — clearly directed at what might be regarded as legacy voters for Messi and Ronaldo — would make the Ballon d’Or an “open competition, rather than a preserve.”
At first glance, of course, it is possible to believe that those changes made a difference in determining the outcome.
It is, after all, only the second time since 2008 that a player other than Messi or Ronaldo has been anointed as the best on the planet. (Benzema’s Real Madrid teammate Luka Modric was the other exception, in 2018.)
It is the first time since 2006 that neither man has at least been on the podium.
Ronaldo, after a disappointing year at Manchester United, finished 10th. Messi, last year’s winner, did not even make the shortlist.
