Winning the Ballon d’Or usually comes with a familiar supporting cast: a league title, a European Cup, a World Cup, a room full of medals and teammates who spent the year making victory look almost inevitable.
Every so often, football refuses to follow the script.
A player can spend twelve months carrying a team that keeps stumbling at the final hurdle, watching other captains lift trophies while his own season slowly turns into a collection of brilliant performances without a medal to show for them. Then, somehow, when the votes are counted, he walks away with the biggest individual prize in the game.
That makes for a rather strange football story, because the Ballon d’Or has always lived somewhere between individual brilliance and collective achievement. A player may score goals that make defenders miserable, produce performances that define an entire season and become the face of his generation, yet football has a habit of asking what his team actually won before giving him the crown.
Six times, the answer was nothing.
Those victories tell us plenty about how the award has changed over the decades, but they also remind us that there are seasons when one player becomes so difficult to ignore that the absence of silverware starts to feel like a footnote. Some of these campaigns were built on outrageous scoring numbers, others on influence, personality or performances on the biggest stage available.
The fascinating part is how differently each player arrived at that moment.
One was already 41 and still tormenting defenders from the wing. Another scored goals at a rate that made an entire season look like a personal challenge. One produced a World Cup campaign that remains lodged in football history, while another crossed borders and walked straight into one of Europe’s most intense rivalries.
And then came 2013, when the argument over whether trophies should matter became particularly fierce.
These are the six occasions when individual brilliance won the argument.
1. Stanley Matthews, 1956
Stanley Matthews was already 41 when the first Ballon d’Or was handed out, an age when most footballers of his generation were long gone from the elite game, yet the Blackpool winger was still capable of making defenders look like they had arrived several seconds late to the same piece of information.
The award was created in 1956 by France Football, with 16 journalists from across Europe taking part in the voting, and Matthews finished with 47 points, edging Alfredo Di Stéfano of Real Madrid by three points while Raymond Kopa finished third on 33.
Blackpool had no major trophy to decorate Matthews’ year, but that hardly made his football less memorable, because his reputation had been built over decades through close control, balance, dribbling and a knack for turning a wide position into a problem that defenders could never quite solve.
The age matters because Matthews was not winning on the promise of youth or the excitement surrounding a player about to dominate the next decade, but on what he was still producing after a career that had already made him one of England’s most recognisable footballers.
He had already won the FA Cup with Blackpool in 1953, producing the performance that became known as the Matthews Final, but that was three years before the first Ballon d’Or and therefore had no business carrying his 1956 vote.
What the journalists were rewarding was the player they had watched during that year, and their decision created a useful precedent that would matter repeatedly over the decades, because a Ballon d’Or could belong to the outstanding footballer even when his club had nothing to show for the season.
Matthews remains the oldest winner in the history of the award, with the official Ballon d’Or records listing his winning age at 41, a number that still looks almost mischievous beside the modern obsession with discovering teenage superstars.
There was also something wonderfully old-fashioned about the voting itself, because Matthews did not need an army of television analysts or a season’s worth of social media arguments to build his case, with journalists simply deciding that the football they had seen from him was good enough to beat Di Stéfano.
The first winner, then, had already made the central argument for this list before anyone knew such a list would exist.
SEE ALSO | Ballon d’Or: How It Became Football’s Biggest Prize
2. Denis Law, 1964
If Matthews won the first Ballon d’Or through the force of experience and brilliance, Denis Law arrived eight years later with a rather more brutal method of persuasion, which was to score goals until the numbers became difficult for anyone to ignore.
Manchester United had a strong 1963-64 season without winning the First Division, finishing second behind Liverpool, while their progress in the FA Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup also ended before the club could collect major silverware.
Law was operating at a different temperature altogether, scoring heavily for Matt Busby’s side and establishing himself as one of the most feared forwards in European football, which helps explain why the voting produced a clear winner despite United’s empty trophy cabinet.
He received 61 points from the 21 journalists who voted, finishing well ahead of Inter Milan’s Luis Suárez on 43 and Real Madrid’s Amancio on 38.
The result also made Law the first Scottish player to win the award, adding another layer to a career that already carried enormous importance for both Manchester United and Scotland.
What makes Law’s victory particularly interesting is that his Ballon d’Or was not based on a single spectacular tournament that briefly bent the football world around him, because his case was built through the relentless accumulation of goals and performances across the season.
He was part of the emerging Manchester United side that would go on to win the English title in 1965 and 1967 and the European Cup in 1968, but those trophies arrived after the vote that crowned him Europe’s best player.
The timing is important because it strips away some of the romanticism that can creep into historical football discussions, leaving a straightforward argument in its place: Law was extraordinary, United were competitive, and the voters decided the first fact mattered more than the second.
3. Gerd Müller, 1970
Müller had a rather unfair advantage in these arguments because his football was often expressed in the language every supporter understands immediately, namely the ball going into the net again and again until someone starts checking whether the numbers can possibly be correct.
During the 1969-70 Bundesliga season, Müller scored 38 league goals, finishing comfortably as the division’s leading scorer while Bayern Munich finished second behind Borussia Mönchengladbach.
Then came the World Cup in Mexico, where Müller scored 10 goals in six matches, finishing as the tournament’s leading scorer even though West Germany were beaten by Italy in the semi-final before defeating Uruguay in the third-place match.
That World Cup campaign gave his Ballon d’Or case another dimension, because Müller was not merely scoring regularly for his club during a strong domestic season; he was also producing goals on the biggest international stage available to a European player.
Bayern had won the Bundesliga and DFB-Pokal in the previous season, but Borussia Mönchengladbach took the league in 1969-70, leaving Bayern without a major domestic trophy during the season in which Müller produced his enormous scoring numbers.
The Ballon d’Or voting was surprisingly tight considering Müller’s statistical dominance, with the Bayern striker taking 77 points, Bobby Moore collecting 70 and Italy’s Gigi Riva finishing on 65.
Moore had his own formidable case after captaining England’s World Cup holders, while Riva was leading the line for Italy, which made the voting less like a coronation and more like a genuine contest between three very different interpretations of greatness.
Müller’s answer was simple enough.
Score.
Score again.
Then score when the stakes become uncomfortable.
He finished 1970 with the kind of statistical footprint that makes the absence of a club trophy feel almost secondary, and the Ballon d’Or followed because the voters had spent the year watching a striker turn the most difficult part of football into something that looked suspiciously routine.
SEE ALSO | Top 6 Premier League Players to Win the Ballon d’Or
4. Kevin Keegan, 1978
Keegan’s story has a little more movement to it, because by the time he won the Ballon d’Or in 1978, he was no longer the Liverpool forward who had helped establish Bob Paisley’s side as one of Europe’s rising powers.
He had moved to Hamburg in 1977, becoming one of the biggest stars in German football and taking on the rather awkward task of proving that his reputation travelled as well as he did.
The first months were difficult, with Hamburg struggling domestically and Keegan finding himself in a new football culture, but the following season under Branko Zebec brought a much stronger version of the Englishman.
Keegan still had no major trophy to celebrate when he won the award, while England had failed to qualify for the 1978 World Cup, removing one of the most obvious stages on which a player could build a Ballon d’Or campaign.
The voting nevertheless went his way, and it was close, with Keegan taking 87 points, Hans Krankl finishing second on 81 and Rob Rensenbrink third on 50.
His performances for Hamburg were strong enough to convince voters that the move from Liverpool had not diminished him, while his personality and status also made him one of the most visible English footballers playing abroad at a time when British stars rarely made that journey.
There is a particularly neat piece of timing around his victory, because Keegan’s former club Liverpool won the European Cup in 1978, beating Club Brugge at Wembley after the player had already left for Germany.
That could easily have tilted the conversation towards Liverpool’s new generation of stars, yet the voters went back to Keegan, which says something about how highly they rated the football he was producing away from Anfield.
The even stranger part came a year later, when Keegan won the award again after Hamburg finally won the Bundesliga, making his 1978 victory the more interesting of the two because he had managed to win the individual prize before the team success arrived.
5. Luís Figo, 2000
By 2000, the Ballon d’Or had entered a different football economy, with television audiences expanding, transfer fees exploding and the biggest clubs becoming increasingly global brands, so Luís Figo’s victory came with considerably more noise around it than Matthews had faced four decades earlier.
Figo had spent the first part of the year with Barcelona before completing his extraordinary move to Real Madrid in the summer, a transfer that would turn him into one of the most unpopular visiting players whenever he returned to Camp Nou.
The football underneath the drama was excellent.
For Portugal at Euro 2000, Figo helped his country reach the semi-finals, while his club performances established him as one of Europe’s most influential wide players, capable of carrying the ball, creating chances and controlling the rhythm of attacks from the flank.
His Ballon d’Or vote reflected the strength of that campaign, with Figo finishing on 197 points, only 16 ahead of Zinedine Zidane and comfortably ahead of Andriy Shevchenko, who collected 85.
The unusual part is that Real Madrid had won the Champions League in May 2000, but Figo was still a Barcelona player when that final was played, so the trophy belonged to his new club before he had actually joined it.
That technical detail matters when discussing trophyless Ballon d’Or winners, because it explains why Figo belongs on this list even though his name became attached to a European champion during the same calendar year.
Barcelona had failed to win the major trophies available to them during the 1999-2000 campaign, while Figo’s new life in Madrid had only just begun when the award was decided.
His case was therefore about what he had actually done rather than what the badge on his shirt would eventually become associated with.
It also helped that Figo was playing in an era when the Ballon d’Or had become a much broader global conversation, meaning his performances for Portugal and Barcelona were being assessed alongside the enormous story surrounding his move to Madrid.
He won, Zidane finished second, Shevchenko was third, and one of football’s strangest individual awards had found another player whose trophy cabinet for the relevant campaign did not tell the whole story.
SEE ALSO | Ballon d’Or Winner’s List Since 1956-2024
6. Cristiano Ronaldo, 2013
Then came Cristiano Ronaldo, and the argument suddenly became much louder.
Real Madrid finished second in La Liga during the 2012-13 season, lost the Copa del Rey final to Atlético Madrid and were eliminated by Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League semi-finals, leaving Ronaldo without the club trophy that usually gives a Ballon d’Or campaign its strongest foundation.
His response was almost absurdly productive.
Ronaldo scored 69 goals in 59 matches for Real Madrid and Portugal during 2013, while also producing nine goals in the Champions League group stage and a three-goal performance against Sweden that sent Portugal through to the 2014 World Cup.
That hat-trick in Stockholm was especially important because Portugal had been pushed into the play-offs after finishing second in their qualifying group, and Ronaldo responded by scoring all three of Portugal’s goals in a 3-2 victory that turned the tie into one of the defining individual performances of the year.
His Champions League numbers were equally difficult to brush aside, with his nine goals in the group stage setting a new record at the time and his overall scoring giving Real Madrid a level of individual production that few teams in Europe could match.
The voting became one of the most fascinating in modern Ballon d’Or history, with Ronaldo finishing ahead of Lionel Messi and Franck Ribéry.
Ribéry had the trophy argument sitting directly beside him, having been a key member of Bayern Munich’s 2013 treble-winning side, while Messi had won La Liga with Barcelona, so Ronaldo’s victory required voters to decide that his individual year outweighed the much more obvious team achievements of his closest rivals.
The final vote reflected just how close the race was, with Ronaldo receiving 1,365 points, Messi 1,205 and Ribéry 1,127.
It was Ronaldo’s second Ballon d’Or, following his 2008 victory with Manchester United, but the contrast between the two awards could hardly have been sharper.
In 2008, Ronaldo had won the Champions League and Premier League with United, while in 2013 he had no major club trophy to hold above his head.
What he had instead was a year in which almost every important footballing conversation eventually came back to him.
And that is why his victory remains the most recent example of a Ballon d’Or winner succeeding without a team trophy.
Why has nobody done it since?
The remarkable part is not just that these aforementioned players have managed it, but how long the football world has now gone without seeing a seventh.
Official Ballon d’Or records confirm that Ronaldo remains the latest winner to take the award without winning a team title in the relevant year, meaning the run has now stretched across eleven editions.
That does not mean the Ballon d’Or has become a trophy awarded exclusively to the best player on the best team, because Lionel Messi’s 2010 victory over World Cup winners Xavi and Andrés Iniesta already proved how complicated that relationship can be.
It does mean the modern football calendar gives elite players more opportunities to attach their individual performances to team success, particularly through the Champions League, domestic title races and major international tournaments.
The six cases also show that winning without a trophy has never followed one formula.
Matthews did it through longevity and genius on the wing, Law through relentless scoring, Müller through a season of almost ridiculous finishing, Keegan through his influence in a new country, Figo through a combination of club and international excellence, and Ronaldo through sheer statistical force.
None of them needed the same kind of season.
They simply needed a year in which the football became too compelling for the absence of silverware to end the argument.
That may be the most interesting thing about the Ballon d’Or itself.
Football is a team game, but every year it still asks voters to isolate one player from the crowd and say, for all the goals, mistakes, medals, defeats and noise surrounding the sport, this was the man who made the year feel different.
Six times, they chose a player whose team had won nothing.
And nobody has managed it since Ronaldo.
