Ballon d’Or, The Best and Golden Shoe: what really differs

Three awards, three different questions

The Ballon d’Or, The Best FIFA and the European Golden Shoe appear in the same football calendar but measure different things. Ballon d’Or voters are journalists: 100 representatives, one from each of the top 100 national teams in the FIFA ranking, order players by decisive individual performances, team achievements and, last, sporting conduct and fair play. The Best combines four equally weighted groups—national-team coaches, captains, accredited media and fans. The European Golden Shoe uses no vote at all: domestic-league goals are multiplied by a league-strength coefficient. So in the same season one player can win one of these awards and not even make another's shortlist — that does not mean a jury got it wrong, only that the question being asked was different.

A naming warning comes first. In English and Russian, “Golden Boot/Shoe” can refer to different prizes: the season-long European Golden Shoe run by European Sports Media, the Golden Boot for a single tournament such as a FIFA World Cup, and domestic league scoring prizes. This guide uses “Golden Shoe” only for the pan-European season award. World Cup and national-league scoring awards follow different rules and are not the focus here.

Why there are three prizes instead of one

From 2010 through 2015, France Football’s Ballon d’Or and FIFA’s World Player award were merged as the FIFA Ballon d’Or. The organisations separated in 2016: France Football restored an independent Ballon d’Or and FIFA launched The Best FIFA Football Awards, first presented in January 2017. The Golden Shoe followed a separate scoring tradition: European Sports Media has awarded the current version since 1996/97, while L’Équipe had run a predecessor from 1967/68. The three prizes therefore reflect an organisational split plus an older statistical tradition, not the artificial division of one award.

Five dimensions that separate the awards

The differences between the three awards come down to five dimensions: who organises them, who votes, what is judged, which period counts and how the final result is calculated. Each is taken in turn below.

Ballon d’Or: how jury opinions become points

The Ballon d’Or shortlist—usually 30 names—is drawn up by France Football and L’Équipe editors, at least one juror from the previous edition, and UEFA ambassadors—for the men’s award, Luís Figo and Fabio Capello—and it is from that list that the 100 journalists each rank ten names. One detail people often miss: through 2021 the jury assessed a calendar year, and from 2022 the preceding season, so the 2026 window, which opened on August 3, 2025, also covers the 2026 FIFA World Cup—it ended on July 19, 2026, the very day the window closed. The ceremony is set for October 26, and the nominees were announced on September 8, 2026; at the time this article was prepared, no winner had been named, and this piece does not name an editorial favourite.

The Best FIFA: why fans and captains have equal group weight

The Best differs because four constituencies share the result equally: national-team coaches, captains, accredited media and fans voting on FIFA.com each account for 25%. Equal group weight does not mean every individual ballot has equal weight. FIFA’s 2025 breakdown lists 197 captains, 203 coaches and 184 media voters, so one ballot inside each named group is normalised within a group of a different size; fans vote at mass scale without a comparable public individual list.

Named voters rank three players for 5-3-1 points. The Best can therefore produce a different winner from the Ballon d’Or because the electorate and aggregation are different. In 2025, however, both awards went to Dembélé. The Best ceremony was held December 16, 2025 in Doha, almost three months after the Ballon d’Or ceremony—not one month later.

European Golden Shoe: coefficients, tie-breaks and exclusions

The basic formula is domestic-league goals multiplied by a league-strength coefficient based on UEFA performance rankings. Goals in European cups or domestic cups do not count. Public sources agree on the coefficient values—2 for the strongest group, 1.5 for the next group and 1 for other leagues—but sources reviewed for this article disagree on the exact ranking-place boundaries, so this guide does not state unsupported cut-off positions.

Since 2019/20, when players finish level on points, Marca—an ESM national representative—reports that fewer minutes played is the first tie-break. Further tie-break stages appear in Wikipedia without a cited primary rule, so they are not presented here as confirmed. In 2025/26 Harry Kane finished first with 36 Bundesliga goals and 72 points, Erling Haaland second with 27 Premier League goals and 54 points, and Kylian Mbappé third with 25 La Liga goals and 50 points.

This remains distinct from a FIFA World Cup Golden Boot. The World Cup scoring prize is confined to one tournament and uses FIFA’s own tie-break procedure, not European league coefficients. Domestic league “golden boots” are likewise limited to one competition.

2024/25 example: Dembélé wins the votes, Mbappé the scoring prize

The 2024/25 cycle illustrates why the awards can diverge without contradiction. Dembélé won both the 2025 Ballon d’Or and The Best, so the press jury and FIFA’s four-group electorate converged on the same player. Mbappé won the European Golden Shoe for the 2024/25 domestic-league season, because that award asks only who accumulated the most weighted league-goal points.

A player can theoretically win all three, but it is rare because the inputs differ. The historical tables reviewed for this project identify 2019 as the single season in which one player—Lionel Messi—combined the Ballon d’Or, The Best and the European Golden Shoe. That observation depends on the historical award tables, not on a shared governing rule.

Why assessment periods make direct comparisons imperfect

Even when two prizes look at almost the same season, their windows are not identical. The Ballon d’Or moved to season-based assessment in 2022; The Best uses a FIFA-defined period that can begin and end on different dates; the Golden Shoe is bounded by domestic league seasons. A late international tournament, a Club World Cup or a few weeks of club football can therefore fall inside one vote but outside another. Comparing winners is useful only after checking what each electorate was actually allowed to consider.

After October 26, 2026: how to compare the three awards

Once the 2026 Ballon d’Or is known, compare it with The Best only after FIFA publishes the 2026 assessment window and final voting breakdown. Compare either voting award with the European Golden Shoe as a different type of measurement: the Shoe is a weighted domestic-goal table, not an expert judgment about the season’s best all-round player. The cleanest question is therefore not “which award is correct?” but “what did this award actually measure?”