FIFA Puskás Award Winners (Full List by Year)

Cristiano Ronaldo won the first FIFA Puskás Award in 2009, and every year since, football’s governing body has handed the prize to the player who scored the most beautiful goal of the year. It is the one major award that does not care about your league, your reputation or even whether the game was fully professional; it cares only about the goal.

That is what makes the winners list so unusual. Superstars sit alongside players almost no one outside their country had heard of, and in 2022 an amputee footballer beat the field. The award is named after Ferenc Puskás, the Hungarian great, and it is decided by a mix of public vote and a FIFA panel. Here is the full year-by-year list, capped at the most recently confirmed winner.

The Puskás Award winners by year

The table lists every FIFA Puskás Award winner and the goal that earned it.

Year	Winner	Country	Notable for
2009	Cristiano Ronaldo	Portugal	Long-range strike vs Porto
2010	Hamit Altıntop	Turkey	Volley for Turkey vs Kazakhstan
2011	Neymar	Brazil	Solo goal for Santos
2012	Miroslav Stoch	Slovakia	Volley for Fenerbahçe
2013	Zlatan Ibrahimović	Sweden	Bicycle kick vs England
2014	James Rodríguez	Colombia	Chest-and-volley at the World Cup
2015	Wendell Lira	Brazil	Bicycle kick in a lower division
2016	Mohd Faiz Subri	Malaysia	Swerving free kick
2017	Olivier Giroud	France	Scorpion-kick for Arsenal
2018	Mohamed Salah	Egypt	Curled finish vs Everton
2019	Dániel Zsóri	Hungary	Bicycle kick on his debut
2020	Son Heung-min	South Korea	Length-of-pitch solo run
2021	Erik Lamela	Argentina	Rabona vs Arsenal
2022	Marcin Oleksy	Poland	Scissor kick in an amputee match
2023	Guilherme Madruga	Brazil	Bicycle kick in Brazil’s lower tiers
2024	Alejandro Garnacho	Argentina	Overhead kick for Manchester United

If a more recent winner has since been announced, treat 2024 as the last confirmed year in this list.

What the award actually rewards

The Puskás Award is deliberately democratic. FIFA assembles a shortlist of the year’s best goals, then a public online vote and a panel of FIFA Legends settle it together. That structure is why the winner is so unpredictable: a superstar’s Champions League screamer competes on equal footing with a strike from a regional Brazilian league.

It also explains the spread of nationalities. Since 2009 the award has gone to players from Portugal, Turkey, Brazil, Slovakia, Sweden, Colombia, Malaysia, France, Egypt, Hungary, South Korea, Argentina and Poland. Few individual honours in the sport travel that widely.

The goals that captured the world

A handful of winners stand out. Zlatan Ibrahimović’s 2013 bicycle kick from distance against England is regularly voted among the greatest goals ever scored. James Rodríguez’s 2014 chest-and-turn volley lit up the World Cup and helped make him a global name overnight. Son Heung-min’s 2020 winner, a run that started inside his own half and beat most of Burnley’s outfield players, is the rare solo goal that felt inevitable from the first touch.

Then there are the unknowns. Wendell Lira, the 2015 winner, was a journeyman striker in Brazil’s lower divisions who retired soon after and became a competitive video gamer. Mohd Faiz Subri’s swerving 2016 free kick for a Malaysian club is still studied for the physics of its late dip. The award gives these goals a global stage they would never otherwise reach.

Marcin Oleksy and the 2022 landmark

The most significant winner is Marcin Oleksy. In 2022 the Polish amputee footballer scored a scissor kick in an amputee league match, and it beat goals from the men’s and women’s professional game to take the award. He was the first disabled player to win it.

The moment mattered beyond the highlight. It signalled that the Puskás Award means what it says, that the most beautiful goal of the year can come from anywhere, and it brought amputee football a level of mainstream attention it had never had. Of all the winners, his is the one that changed how the award is understood.

No repeat winners, and why

One quiet fact about the list: no player has ever won it twice. That is not a rule; it is a consequence of what the award measures. Season-long honours like the Ballon d’Or reward sustained excellence and naturally repeat. A single perfect goal is a different thing, and lightning that specific rarely strikes the same player twice on the shortlist.

For the award that does reward a whole season, see our list of Ballon d’Or winners, where the repeat-winner story is the opposite. And if you want to test your eye for a great strike, our roundup of the most goals in football history covers the players who scored them in bulk rather than just once beautifully. Or draft your own legendary XI in 38-0 and chase a perfect soccer season with the goalscorers you rate most. Cristiano Ronaldo started the list in 2009; the winners since prove the award belongs to the goal, not the name.