When sports writers Gabriel Hanot and Jacques Ferran concocted an award for journalists to honor the finest European soccer player of the year way back in the mid 1950s, they could hardly have known what they would eventually unleash.
The Ballon d’Or, organized each year by France Football magazine and voted for by selected journalists, has grown steadily in importance over the decades to become the single most significant individual honor in global soccer. Nothing else—not even FIFA’s official trinket, clumsily titled The Best Awards—even comes close.
