The World Cup Golden Ball has never belonged to the team that wins the trophy, not really, because it answers a different question entirely, one about the single player who bent a tournament around their own will for a month and made everyone else look like they were chasing the same game from a step behind.
Right now, in the middle of a 48-team World Cup spread across the United States, Mexico and Canada, that question is alive again, and the answer is nowhere close to settled.
Lionel Messi has just scored the first hat trick of his international career at 38 years old, in a 3-0 win over Algeria that felt less like a group stage formality and more like a man refusing to let the lights dim before he is ready. Lamine Yamal is carrying Spain’s hopes at 18.
Kylian Mbappé is still searching for the Golden Ball that has eluded him twice, and right now, with two goals against Senegal, he’s actually in line. And somewhere in the noise of fixtures still to be played, the next name on this list is being written in real time.
There is something almost cruel about the Golden Ball as an idea.
It does not care who lifted the trophy. It cares who made the tournament feel like theirs, and football history is full of players who won the individual prize while watching someone else hoist the cup, which tells you everything about how this award has always worked.
It rewards command of a stage rather than the final scoreline, and that distinction has produced some of the strangest, most human stories in the sport’s history.
How It All Started
Before the Golden Ball became an official institution, FIFA looked back and anointed retrospective winners stretching all the way to the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay.
According to FIFA’s official records, this recognition celebrates the players who demonstrated exceptional skill, leadership, and impact throughout the tournament. Pelé earned the recognition for 1970, Garrincha for 1962, and the great Zizinho for 1950, names that read like a roll call of Brazilian football’s golden age.
But the modern era of the award effectively begins in 1978, when Mario Kempes walked off the pitch in Buenos Aires as both the Golden Boot winner and the spiritual centre of Argentina’s first World Cup triumph. The Adidas Golden, Silver and Bronze Balls were first formally awarded at the 1978 FIFA World Cup.
Kempes was not an elegant player in the way later winners would be. He was powerful, muscular, relentless, a striker who could carry the ball through half a defence at full pace before finishing with brutal efficiency.
His six goals in that tournament, including two in the final against the Netherlands, announced to the world what the award would come to represent: a player who could change the shape and direction of an entire tournament through the force of his individual quality.
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Paolo Rossi, 1982
On top of Italy’s third World Cup win, young phenom forward Paolo Rossi was awarded the first-ever official Golden Ball award.
Rossi appeared in seven games for the Italians, scored three goals and added two assists as they defeated West Germany in the final. What the numbers barely capture is the context.
Rossi had returned from a two-year ban related to a match-fixing scandal just weeks before the tournament, and Italy’s campaign in Spain began in extraordinary torpor, three draws in the group stage that had most of the press writing them off entirely.
Then Rossi caught fire. His hat-trick against Brazil in the second group phase is still discussed as one of the great individual performances in World Cup history, a game Brazil were widely expected to win, a game that Rossi almost single-handedly turned on its head through relentless movement, intelligent positioning, and clinical finishing at exactly the right moments.
Diego Maradona, 1986
Clinching Argentina’s second World Cup win, midfielder Diego Maradona became 1986’s Golden Ball award winner following their 3-2 win over West Germany in Mexico.
In their run to the tournament, Maradona contributed five goals and five assists in seven games, including the infamous “Hand of God” goal and the remarkable “Greatest Goal of the 21st Century” in the quarterfinal win against England.
That quarterfinal against England at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City is perhaps the single most talked-about performance in World Cup history, and for good reason.
Within the space of four minutes in the second half, Maradona produced both the most scandalous goal in the tournament’s history and the greatest.
The handball was brazen, cheeky, and utterly without apology. The second goal involved beating five England players and the goalkeeper before rolling the ball into an empty net, a run that seemed to begin somewhere around the halfway line and end somewhere in football legend.
By the time Argentina lifted the trophy, the Golden Ball was a formality. No one else had come close.
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Salvatore Schillaci, 1990
Some Golden Balls feel inevitable. Others arrive from somewhere nobody was expecting. Italian forward Salvatore Schillaci made history as the first Golden Ball winner to not lift the World Cup trophy. While Italy settled for third place and West Germany claimed their second title, Schillaci contributed six goals and one assist through their tournament run.
Schillaci had barely established himself in Serie A at the time of the 1990 tournament, a compact, ferociously intense striker from Palermo who looked permanently on the verge of spontaneous combustion.
His tournament began from the bench and ended with the Golden Boot alongside the Golden Ball, six goals in a country gripped by Azzurri fever in a way that had not been seen since 1982.
That he won the individual award without lifting the trophy gave his story a particular bittersweet quality, a player who reached the highest peak of his career in the course of a single month, and who never quite found those heights again.
Romario, 1994
Brazil had not won the World Cup since 1970. By the time they arrived in the United States in 1994, that drought carried a genuine weight, all the more oppressive given the extraordinary talent Brazil kept producing and the various near-misses along the way.
Romario was the answer, a pocket-sized centre-forward from Rio who operated in a ten-yard square around the penalty area and, within that small territory, was essentially unstoppable. Romario, considered to be one of the greatest soccer players of all time, was given the Golden Ball award after Brazil secured their fourth title with a penalty shootout victory over Italy in the Rose Bowl, the first World Cup final decided that way.
He partnered with Bebeto in an attacking combination that remains one of the most celebrated in the tournament’s history, two players so perfectly attuned to each other that Brazil moved through the knockout stages with a fluency that made the whole thing look straightforward.
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Ronaldo, 1998
The 1998 tournament in France was supposed to be Ronaldo’s coronation. Ronaldo was the star of the show in 2002 as Brazil won the World Cup for a fifth time in Japan and South Korea, banishing the ghosts of 1998, when he suffered a seizure before the defeat to France in the final.
In France, he had arrived as the most exciting striker in the world, young, blisteringly quick, and with a finishing technique that made goalkeepers look like bystanders. He was extraordinary through the group stage and the knockouts, finding the net and pulling defences apart with a directness that nobody could quite handle.
And then came the final, and the seizure, and the mystery surrounding his late inclusion in the starting lineup, and Zidane’s two headers, and France winning 3-0 in a stadium that felt less like a football ground and more like a national coronation.
Ronaldo won the Golden Ball in 1998 despite the ultimate defeat, the voting taking place before a final in which he was visibly not himself. It set the stage for the most satisfying sporting redemption story the World Cup has produced. In 2002, he came back.
His second tournament winner is covered below, but to understand the full arc of his Golden Ball story, 1998 matters enormously because it shows what the award can capture that statistics alone cannot: the impression a player leaves across an entire tournament, the way an individual can define six weeks of football even when the very last chapter does not go their way.
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Oliver Kahn, 2002
Oliver Kahn, who showed off his amazing saves during the 2002 World Cup, was awarded the Golden Ball, and after the vote, Ronaldo scored two goals in the second half to lead Brazil to victory, prompting criticism about whether the voting timing was appropriate.
The decision to award it to a goalkeeper remains one of the most singular in the award’s history, a recognition that Kahn had carried Germany to a final they had no realistic business reaching, making save after save in a tournament where the team in front of him was often stretched to its limits.
That Ronaldo then dismantled him in the final with two goals felt cruelly ironic, a reminder of how the timing of the vote can produce results that feel strange in retrospect.
The voting system was subsequently changed to ensure it happened after the final had concluded.
Zinedine Zidane, 2006
There is a sense sometimes with the Golden Ball that there is a desire to anoint a great, to reward him for a brilliant career. Zidane turned 34 during the 2006 tournament. He was coming to the end, having not had a great World Cup previously, suspended for a crucial phase in 1998 and then part of the France side eliminated in the group stage in 2002.
Narrative seemed to demand that this would be his tournament.
And for long stretches it was. His performance against Brazil in the quarterfinal was one of the defining individual displays of the decade, a man in complete control of a game at its highest intensity.
When he put France ahead in the final with a Panenka penalty that hit the underside of the bar and bounced down over the line, it seemed like his tournament.
Then came the headbutt. Although Zidane was honoured with the Golden Ball award, he was sent off for the headbutt incident in extra time after voting had ended. The images of him walking past the World Cup trophy on his way off the pitch, medal-less and red-carded in the last act of his playing career, remain among the most haunting in the sport’s visual history.
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Diego Forlan, 2010
South Africa 2010 will be remembered for the vuvuzelas, for Spain’s methodical dismantling of every opponent they faced, and for Diego Forlan producing the tournament of his life at an age when most strikers are beginning to fade.
His goal against Ghana sent the quarterfinal to a shootout and led to a penalty win over the African nation. The team lost in the semifinals to the Netherlands, and even with a goal against Germany in the third-place game, Uruguay still lost. He had five goals in the tournament.
Forlan was a player who had always carried a slight underdog quality, even at his club peak, a striker who took a while to find his best form at Manchester United before flourishing at Villarreal and Atletico Madrid.
In South Africa, he was transformed, striking the ball with a ferocity and precision that felt almost operatic at times. His volleyed goal against Germany in the third-place match remains one of the most technically perfect strikes ever seen at a World Cup, a finish hit so cleanly it barely seemed to touch the ground before it was in the net. Uruguay finished fourth.
Forlan won the Golden Ball. Nobody seriously argued.
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Lionel Messi, 2014
Argentina vs Germany in the final in Rio. Messi, throughout the tournament, had been brilliant in patches and strangely silent in others, a player who could carry a team and then, occasionally, go missing in a way that his doubters seized upon with barely disguised satisfaction.
He led Argentina to a World Cup final, but the team lost to Germany, and Messi collected the Golden Ball trophy, looking crushed after the loss.
He had four goals and an assist that helped him land the award. The debate around the 2014 Golden Ball has never entirely gone away.
There were players at that tournament who arguably performed more consistently, and the image of Messi standing alone on the Maracanã pitch, trophy in hand, visibly devastated, struck many observers as deeply uncomfortable.
It looked less like a celebration and more like a consolation, and for a player of Messi’s pride, that particular kind of recognition felt complicated. He has spoken in subsequent years about how hollow that moment felt, which made what happened eight years later carry an almost unbearable emotional charge.
Luka Modric, 2018
Croatia had never reached a World Cup final. Modric, by 2018, was one of the best midfielders in the world, but the question that hung over him entering the tournament was whether he could do it at the very highest level, carrying a nation into its greatest moments rather than being carried by a club full of superstars.
Modric helped lift Croatia out of a tough Group D with Argentina, Iceland and Nigeria as competitors.
He played key minutes for the team’s victories over Russia and England in the quarterfinals and semifinals, respectively. Croatia lost to France in the final, but Modric was named the Golden Ball winner. He had two goals and an assist in 691 tournament minutes.
What those numbers cannot capture is the manner of his play, the way he controlled games from central midfield with a combination of technical brilliance and physical intensity that made 32-year-old legs look completely impervious to fatigue.
He was the best player at that tournament by a significant margin. For once, the voting felt straightforward.
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Lionel Messi, 2022
Lionel Messi made history by becoming the first player ever to win the FIFA World Cup Golden Ball more than once. Messi was voted as the best player at Qatar 2022 after leading his Argentina side to glory in the final against France.
The 35-year-old scored twice in the final to end the tournament with seven goals and three assists. Messi also converted a penalty in the shootout, which Argentina won 4-2 after an epic final had finished 3-3 following extra time.
There was nothing complicated about this one.
Messi was the best player at the 2022 World Cup by a distance that felt almost embarrassing, given the quality surrounding him. He was the conductor and the striker and the talisman simultaneously, the player who made Argentina’s shape and rhythm and confidence work, and who, in the moments of greatest pressure, stepped forward with decisive actions rather than retreating into safety.
The 2014 Golden Ball had felt like a consolation prize. The 2022 version felt like the universe correcting an old debt.
Where Things Stand as the 2026 Tournament Unfolds
Now football finds itself watching Messi attempt something that very few players in the sport’s history have ever managed: a World Cup at 38 years old, turning 39 during the group stage itself, captaining a defending champion that everyone expected to lean on him less by now rather than more.
He scored the first World Cup hat trick of his career in Argentina’s opening match of this tournament, a performance that immediately reignited every conversation about whether he might somehow add a third Golden Ball to a collection that already stands alone.
Messi already holds the record for most World Cup matches played at 26, along with the most total minutes on the pitch across the tournament’s history, numbers that keep climbing with every additional appearance he makes in this, very likely, his final World Cup.
The competition for the award this time around looks unusually deep, partly a function of the tournament’s expansion to 48 teams, spreading quality across more groups than ever before.
Lamine Yamal arrives fresh off a La Liga title-winning season with Barcelona, already established as one of the best players in the world despite still being a teenager, and a strong tournament would make him the first teenager in history to win the World Cup Golden Ball.
Harry Kane brings the kind of finishing instinct that worries every defence he faces, having scored 61 goals in 51 games for Bayern Munich the previous season and claimed the European Golden Shoe for his trouble.
Ousmane Dembélé enters as the reigning Ballon d’Or winner, a player who once carried a reputation for inconsistency but has matured into someone capable of dictating matches through his off the ball pressing as much as his attacking output, while Michael Olise is fresh off a Bundesliga winning campaign at Bayern Munich built on 36 goal contributions across 32 appearances, his left foot conjuring danger from positions that should not produce it.
Declan Rice, Jude Bellingham, Bukayo Saka, Vitinha and Bruno Fernandes all sit somewhere on the long list of players capable of forcing their way into this conversation before the tournament reaches its final stages, and that depth of candidates is partly what makes predicting this year’s winner feel genuinely uncertain rather than a formality dressed up as suspense.
History does offer one warning for anyone assuming the tournament’s top scorer will automatically claim the individual prize, too. Of the eleven previous official Golden Ball winners, only two were also the tournament’s leading goalscorer in that same edition: Rossi in 1982 and Schillaci in 1990, both Italians, both separated by eight years and very different paths to the same strange coincidence.
The award has consistently rewarded something broader than a tally of goals, the sense of control over a tournament’s rhythm, the moments that get replayed years later regardless of where they sit on a stat sheet, and that pattern shows no obvious sign of changing now.
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A Prize That Keeps Rewriting Its Own Rules
What makes the Golden Ball’s history so compelling, more than three decades after it became official, is how little consistency exists between its winners beyond the fact that each one made a tournament feel impossible to look away from.
Rossi’s redemption, Maradona’s total command, Schillaci’s improbable emergence, Kahn’s goalkeeping masterclass in a losing cause, Modrić’s orchestration of a small nation’s improbable run, Messi’s two completely different paths to the same unmatched record. None of these stories resembles the others, and that is precisely the point.
As this tournament moves deeper into its second round of fixtures of the group stages and toward the knockout rounds that will eventually decide everything, the Golden Ball conversation will keep shifting with every match that produces a moment nobody saw coming.
Maybe it ends with a teenager making history.
Maybe it ends with a 39-year-old refusing to accept that his body has limits, his talent has not yet reached. Maybe, as has happened six times before, the winner watches someone else lift the trophy while walking away with the individual prize anyway, proof once again that this particular crown has never needed company to mean something.
