Most Ballon d'Or Awards: Messi Leads With 8

Lionel Messi has won the most Ballon d’Or awards, with eight. He collected them across 14 years, from his first in 2009 to his most recent in 2023, a span no other player has come close to matching. Cristiano Ronaldo is second with five.

Those two names dominate the record for a simple reason: between 2008 and 2023 they won 13 of the awards on offer, turning football’s oldest individual prize into a private duel. Before them, no player had won it more than three times. Here is the full ranked list, how the top of it was built, and the separate record for the women’s award.

Most Ballon d’Or wins: the full ranking

The table ranks players by total men’s Ballon d’Or awards won, with the years each was claimed.

Rank	Wins	Player	Award years
1	8	Lionel Messi	2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2019, 2021, 2023
2	5	Cristiano Ronaldo	2008, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017
3	3	Michel Platini	1983, 1984, 1985
3	3	Johan Cruyff	1971, 1973, 1974
3	3	Marco van Basten	1988, 1989, 1992
6	2	Alfredo Di Stéfano	1957, 1959
6	2	Franz Beckenbauer	1972, 1976
6	2	Ronaldo (Brazil)	1997, 2002

The three-win tier is where the old order sits. Cruyff, Platini and van Basten each defined an era, yet none was allowed a fourth, and for decades three looked like a ceiling. Messi cleared it in his second season of winning and never stopped.

How Messi reached eight

Messi’s eight break into two phases. The first was a four-year run from 2009 to 2012, the only time anyone has won the men’s award in four straight years. The second was a scatter of wins in 2015, 2019, 2021 and 2023, each tied to a standout season or, in 2021 and 2023, to major trophies with Argentina.

That 2023 award is the one that put daylight between him and the field. It came after he captained Argentina to the 2022 World Cup, and it made the gap to Ronaldo three clear awards. No active player is within five of Messi, so his record looks safe for years rather than seasons.

Ronaldo and the two-man era

Cristiano Ronaldo’s five wins came in a tight window either side of Messi’s peak. He won in 2008, then again in 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017, mostly during his Real Madrid years and their run of Champions League titles. For most of that decade the award effectively had two candidates and everyone else.

It is worth being precise about the rivalry: they did not win every single year between them, but they won every year from 2008 to 2021 except 2018, when Luka Modric broke the run. That near-total grip is why the record for most wins now starts so far above the historical three.

For the deeper story of how the prize started in 1956 and how its rules changed, see our history of the Ballon d’Or, which covers the eras before this two-man age.

The women’s Ballon d’Or is a separate, faster record

France Football added a women’s Ballon d’Or in 2018, so its record books are still being written. Ada Hegerberg won the first, then Alexia Putellas and Aitana Bonmatí each strung together back-to-back wins, Bonmatí taking the 2023 and 2024 editions on the back of Barcelona and Spain’s dominance.

Because the women’s award is barely a handful of years old, its all-time leader will keep changing as the current stars add to their totals. That makes it the opposite of the men’s list, where one player has already built a lead almost no one expects to be caught.

Where the money follows the medals

Individual honours and earning power tend to travel together at the very top of football. The players near the top of this list are also among the sport’s biggest earners, a pattern our ranking of the highest-paid soccer players makes clear. The short version of the record itself: Lionel Messi leads with eight Ballon d’Or awards, Cristiano Ronaldo has five, and everyone else in history stops at three.