The FIFA World Player of the Year was an international football award introduced annually by FIFA at the FIFA World Player Gala between 1991 and 2015. The international team coaching staff and captains, as well as media representatives, choose the player they believe executed the best in the preceding calendar year. From 2001 to 2009, parallel awards for men and women were given instead of only one award for the world’s best men’s player. In 2010, the men’s award was merged with the FIFA Ballon d’Or, while the women’s award was retained until 2015. Men’s and women’s awards were combined into The Best FIFA Football Awards in 2015.
Even during the men’s era, Brazilian players won 8 out of 19 years, while French players won three – the second most. Brazil dominated the competition with five individual players, being followed by Italy and Portugal with 2 each. Ronaldo, who managed to win at the age of 20, was the reigning champion in 1996, and Fabio Cannavaro, who managed to win at the age of 33 in 2006. Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane each won 3 times, and Ronaldo and Ronaldinho are the only players to triumph in consecutive years.
The FIFA Ballon d’Or was the comparable men’s award from 2010 to 2015, following the amalgamation of the FIFA World Player of the Year and the French Football Ballon d’Or awards. The awards have been supplemented by The Best FIFA Men’s Player and The Best FIFA Women’s Player awards since 2016. The award went to eight female footballers: three Germans, three Americans, one Brazilian, and one Japanese. Marta, the youngest recipient in 2006 at the age of 20, has won five consecutive awards, the highest number of any player. Birgit Prinz won 3 times in a row, while Mia Hamm won twice. Nadine Angerer, who was 35 when she won in 2013, is the oldest winner; she is perhaps the only winner of either gender.
Voting Process
The winners are selected by national team coaches and captains, as well as international media legislators invited by FIFA. In a positional voting system, each voter is given three votes valued at five points, three points, and one point, and the three finalists are instructed based on the total number of points. Receiving complaints from some sections of the media over prior years’ nominations, FIFA has provided selection processes from which its voters can choose their choices since 2004.
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Positional voting is a positioned voting election system in which options or candidates are assigned a score based on their rank and position on every ballot, and the candidate who has the most points overall wins. In any adjoining pair, the lesser preferred option is usually less valuable than the higher ranked one. Although it may be weighted the same at times, it’s never good enough to warrant more.
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