Alexia Putellas picked up a record-equalling third Ballon d'Or Féminin at the London Palladium on Monday night, and the result was entirely correct. The 32-year-old Spaniard registered 14 goal contributions in just 11 Women's Champions League appearances last season, helped Barcelona lift the trophy, and then starred as Spain won the Nations League finals last December. She is, without argument, one of the greatest to ever do it. The problem is not who won. The problem is everything the ceremony around her revealed about how this award still works, and who it still cannot quite bring itself to see.
Six Years, One Country, Zero Surprises
This was the sixth consecutive year in which the Ballon d'Or Féminin went to either Putellas or her Barcelona and Spain teammate Aitana Bonmatí. Six years. The same club. The same nation. To be absolutely clear, both players have earned every vote. Putellas's comeback alone, following the ACL injury she sustained in 2022, is the kind of story sport rarely gives you cleanly. She did not just recover. She returned to the very top of the game and stayed there, which is a different and considerably harder thing. Her acceptance speech said everything about where her heart remains despite her move to London City Lionesses: "This prize is for Barcelona." Fourteen years at that club, and no ceremony microphone was going to change that.
Barcelona had an almost clean sweep of the evening's bigger honours. Cata Coll took the goalkeeper prize, head coach Pere Romeu picked up the coach award, and Vicky López won the young player award. Ewa Pajor finished second behind Putellas for the main prize, and Clara Serrajordi finished second in the young player vote. It was a dominant evening for the European champions, and it reflected a dominant season. The only jarring note came when Barcelona president Joan Laporta, accepting the club of the year award for the women's side, veered off into talk about his belief that the men's team could win the Champions League this season. At a women's football awards ceremony. While specifically accepting an award for the women's club of the year. The room deserved better than that.
Where Were All The Women?
The ceremony itself passed without the kind of sexist controversy that dogged the early years after France Football finally introduced the women's award in 2018, which is a low bar but progress nonetheless. The shortlists now cover the same categories as the men's. That matters. But parity in categories is not the same as parity in treatment, and Monday night illustrated that gap in a few uncomfortable ways. Ten players were nominated for the men's young talent award, and only five for the women's equivalent. The same disparity appeared in the goalkeeper shortlists. Nobody has explained why, and nobody seems particularly eager to.
The live show also had a notable shortage of women's players actually presenting prizes. Lucy Bronze appeared on stage to hand López her young player award, and that was largely it. Putellas herself received the Ballon d'Or Féminin from Michael Owen. There is nothing wrong with Michael Owen as a human being, but in a room that could have placed Mia Hamm, Birgit Prinz or Sun Wen on that stage, it was a choice that said something. The uncomfortable reason there are so few obvious candidates is that the award was introduced so late. Its entire list of winners fits on a beer mat: Ada Hegerberg, Megan Rapinoe, Putellas and Bonmatí. That is a structural problem that only time can fix, but it helps to name it.
The African Elephant In The Room
Here is where the real discomfort sits. The voting period for this year's prizes ran from 3 August 2025 to 19 July 2026. That window was clearly designed around the conclusion of the men's World Cup this summer. The consequence is that this year's rearranged Wafcon, which ran from 26 July to 16 August 2026, fell entirely outside the eligible period. Performances from that tournament will count towards next year's prizes instead. As a result, Cameroon's Wafcon-winning head coach Valentine Nguele was not even nominated for coach of the year, and African players were almost entirely absent from the shortlists. Almost, because Temwa Chawinga became the first African player to finish in the women's top ten. She arguably deserved to be higher.
This is not a minor scheduling quirk. This is a structural choice, whether intentional or not, that systematically disadvantages football played outside Europe's established calendar. The Ballon d'Or has always been accused of being a prize for players from top nations, and the limited shortlist does nothing to shift that narrative. If you cannot accommodate the Wafcon in the voting window, the question you have to ask is what you are actually optimising for.
The Ones Who Won't Win Next Year Either
Khadija Shaw finished third on Monday night after firing Manchester City to their first domestic title in a decade, and that top-three finish without a single Women's Champions League appearance tells you everything about the esteem she is held in across the game. Haiti's Melchie Dumornay, described by the Guardian's Tom Garry as the best player he had the pleasure of seeing live in the 2025-26 season, finished fourth at 23 years old. Her time may come, but the honest read is that it is most likely to arrive in an even-numbered year when a Women's World Cup is in play.
That is the uncomfortable pattern here. Pajor finished second this year after a brilliant Barcelona campaign. But as a Polish international, her route to winning this in a World Cup year is almost impossibly narrow. Shaw, Dumornay, and players like them are brilliant enough to crack the top five. Whether the award's current structure will ever fully recognise them is a different question entirely. [Fifa has already started taking steps to level the playing field for women's football more broadly](/uprise/football/fifa-increases-preparation-money-for-womens-world-cup-to-match), but the Ballon d'Or remains its own island, with its own logic.
What Comes Next
Putellas is already at London City Lionesses, and if she maintains anything close to last season's form, betting against her next year feels reckless. Spain will be targeting a successful defence of the Women's World Cup in Brazil, and if they do it with Putellas pulling the strings, the narrative will write itself. [England, meanwhile, are already looking ahead to that tournament with their own set of questions to answer](/uprise/football/six-questions-facing-england-as-they-target-next-years-womens-world), and the prospect of the Ballon d'Or conversation running alongside a home-continent World Cup cycle will inevitably centre a familiar group of nations.
That is the honest forecast, and it is not a comfortable one. The Ballon d'Or Féminin is still a better award than it was eight years ago. Putellas is a worthy champion, a humble one at that, and a genuine role model for a sport that is growing fast enough to deserve better governance than it sometimes gets. But the shortlist limitations, the scheduling that cuts out the Wafcon, the missing women presenters, the unequal nominee lists: none of this is invisible any more. The award is improving. The pace of improvement is the argument.