FIFA Puskás Award Winners: Full List, 2009-2025

Santiago Montiel is the latest FIFA Puskás Award winner. His overhead kick for Independiente against Independiente Rivadavia won the 2025 prize, extending a list that began with Cristiano Ronaldo in 2009.

The list mixes global stars with players whose winning goal introduced them to a much wider audience. FIFA names the award after Ferenc Puskás and uses both a fan vote and a FIFA Legends panel in the final decision. The table below follows FIFA’s official record through 2025.

The Puskás Award winners by year

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

Santiago Montiel’s 2025 winning goal

Montiel scored the winner on May 11, 2025, for Independiente against Independiente Rivadavia. With his back to goal, he met a dropping ball with an overhead kick from outside the penalty area. FIFA confirmed him as the Puskás winner at The Best FIFA Football Awards 2025.

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.

The award values technique and spectacle rather than speed alone. Our list of the fastest goals in football history measures a different kind of memorable finish.

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.