The Ballon d'Or is the award given to the best footballer in the world as deemed by a panel of international journalists, coaches, and national team captains. I used data to try and predict this year's winner.

To do this, I built a model and analyzed historical Ballon d'Or data to understand what it really takes to win – looking at factors like age, position, league, nationality, major honors, and more.

The visualization shown here is part of the analysis on nationality.

Would love to hear your thoughts – and your predictions for this year!

Posted by NotLaurenceFishburne

9 comments

  3. Ronaldo won 5 out of portugal’s 7 Ballon d’Ors. Argentina has 8, but all 8 belong to Messi.

    What if they had a different nationality? Suppose Messi was an Australian. Suddenly, Argentina would go from the best country to win the award in to the worst, and Australia goes from the worst to the best country.

    So it might be interesting to go with number of winners rather than just number of wins. Having a high number of winners in a country would suggest either a bias in voting or a great footballing system in the country, both factors that actually affect your chance to win the award.

  5. To be fair Argentina only has one player that just won it 8 times (still obviously ridiculously impressive)

    If you’d go by players that won Germany and France would be on top

  7. Brazil would have like 14 if the Ballon D’or wasn’t Eurocentric till 1994

  8. Important to note, like really important, that until 1995 the Ballon D’Or was an award to the best European player. So, Pelé, Maradona, Romário, Zico, Francescoli, Garrincha, Kempes, etc. were all inagible to win in times they would/could. They even published a revamped list some years ago, with this new winners:

    Pelé x7, Maradona ×2, Garrincha x1, Kempes x1, Romário ×1.

  9. Just one note about Africa. Weah might officially count as the only winner, but Eusébio was born in Mozambique and lived there until he went to Benfica at 18. He was an African player, but Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony so he counts as a Portuguese player for his 1965 win.

    And, imo, the best African player ever.

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