By David Butler
The 2025 Ballon d'Or was awarded to Ousmane Dembélé on the 22nd of September. The contest to choose the worlds best footballer has been subject to a range of criticism over the years in particular media driven biases and accusations of bias based on nationality or players narratives rather than objective performances. Defensive players generally get forgotten and problems related to team effects often come up. The three still ambiguous criteria for selecting a winner is ‘individual, decisive and impressive performances’, ‘Titles won’ and ‘Fair play, behaviour on and off field”.
It was interesting to see the invidual journalist judgments that were published. For example, John Greechan from Edinburgh Evening News gave Scott McTominay his number 1. Inaz Mazhar for Al-Alram (Egypt) gave her number 1 vote to Mo Salah. There are other less obvious nationality based votes – for Cleber Machado (Brazil) Raphina was deemed second place, more prominentth most other journalists had the Brazilian. Vinicius Jn. also makes the list. Florian Wirtz made a rare appearance on a ballot, and this was from the Kicker vote of Karl-Heinz Wild.
Coupe, Gergaud and Noury studied bias in this setting and published their paper in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics in 2018. The takeaway message is that ‘similarity’ biases are substantial, with jury members disproportionately voting for candidates from their own country, own national team, own continent and own league team. While this bias may not have a strong effect on outcomes they still exist.
The 2025 Ballon d'Or was awarded to Ousmane Dembélé on the 22nd of September. The contest to choose the worlds best footballer has been subject to a range of criticism over the years in particular media driven biases and accusations of bias based on nationality or players narratives rather than objective performances. Defensive players generally get forgotten and problems related to team effects often come up. The three still ambiguous criteria for selecting a winner is ‘individual, decisive and impressive performances’, ‘Titles won’ and ‘Fair play, behaviour on and off field”.
It was interesting to see the invidual journalist judgments that were published. For example, John Greechan from Edinburgh Evening News gave Scott McTominay his number 1. Inaz Mazhar for Al-Alram (Egypt) gave her number 1 vote to Mo Salah. There are other less obvious nationality based votes – for Cleber Machado (Brazil) Raphina was deemed second place, more prominentth most other journalists had the Brazilian. Vinicius Jn. also makes the list. Florian Wirtz made a rare appearance on a ballot, and this was from the Kicker vote of Karl-Heinz Wild.
Coupe, Gergaud and Noury studied bias in this setting and published their paper in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics in 2018. The takeaway message is that ‘similarity’ biases are substantial, with jury members disproportionately voting for candidates from their own country, own national team, own continent and own league team. While this bias may not have a strong effect on outcomes they still exist.
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