Ronaldo Leads Messi in Official Ballon d'Or All-Time Vote

The oldest rivalry in modern football has a new arena. The official Ballon d'Or platform is asking fans to crown the greatest Ballon d'Or-winning season in history — and Cristiano Ronaldo's 2008 campaign is leading Lionel Messi's 2012 by a landslide.

The vote that puts Ronaldo back on top

The Ballon d'Or's official platform has launched a special fan competition — the B.O.A.T., or Ballon d'Or Of All Time — inviting supporters to choose the finest individual season among the players who have lifted the trophy at least twice.

Ten legends made the cut: Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldo Nazário, Marco van Basten, Michel Platini, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Kevin Keegan, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff and Alfredo Di Stéfano. But the spotlight, inevitably, has fallen on the two biggest stars of the modern era — and the early numbers are one-sided.

With voting open since early October, Cristiano Ronaldo's 2008 Ballon d'Or season commands 62% of the vote. Messi's 2012 campaign — the fourth of his record eight wins — has drawn just 13%. His 2023 title, sealed after lifting the World Cup in Qatar with Argentina, sits second among his seasons on 9%. The rest of the leaderboard trails far behind: Ronaldo's 2007 on 7%, his 2016 on 2%, and nothing else above 1%.

How the B.O.A.T. contest works

This is not a straight player-versus-player poll. Fans must pick a specific season from among each legend's Ballon d'Or-winning campaigns, turning the contest into a debate about which single campaign was the greatest.

There is a twist: each vote costs €1. Fans can vote as many times as they like, even repeatedly for the same player, and they can watch the percentages move as the tally grows. Every voter is entered into a draw for two tickets to this year's Ballon d'Or ceremony in Paris, plus a special photo with the award itself.

Voting opened in early October and closes at midnight on 27 October, Paris time, with the final result expected to be announced on October 28.

The seasons up for judgment

Ronaldo's leading season needs little introduction. His first Ballon d'Or arrived in 2008 at the peak of his powers with Manchester United, when he scored 42 goals across all competitions and powered Sir Alex Ferguson's side to both the Premier League and the UEFA Champions League. Nearly two decades on, it is the campaign that first placed him among football's defining names.

Messi's 2012, by contrast, was the middle of an unprecedented run — the fourth of four consecutive Ballon d'Or titles. It crowned a calendar year in which he rewrote the record books, yet it sits well back in the voting at 13%, with his support split across his eight separate winning seasons.

That fragmentation is the quiet story of the leaderboard. Messi has eight Ballon d'Or titles to Ronaldo's five, which means his vote is scattered across far more campaigns. Ronaldo's fans, by contrast, have largely rallied behind a single iconic season.

The rest of the top-ten nominees are barely registering. Messi's other five wins and Ronaldo's remaining seasons all sit below 1% or register no votes at all — and none of the other eight legends, from Cruyff to Di Stéfano, has broken through. For all the breadth of the field, the contest has already collapsed into the duel everyone expected.

The catch behind the landslide

The 62% headline deserves a note of caution. Because each vote costs a euro and fans may vote unlimited times for the same player, the percentages reflect total paid votes, not the number of individual voters. A small group of determined fans — or even one deep-pocketed superfan — can move the needle far more than in a conventional poll.

That format has prompted fair questions about how much the leaderboard reflects football judgment versus organized fan power. Ronaldo's commanding lead is real on the scoreboard the contest publishes, but the mechanics make it closer to a measure of mobilization than of sporting consensus.

It is a clever commercial design, too: every euro flows to the award's own platform, and the ceremony-ticket draw gives fans a tangible reason to keep paying. Whatever the result on October 28, the Ballon d'Or brand wins either way.

None of which makes it any less interesting as a cultural snapshot: two decades into the Messi-Ronaldo debate, the fan armies still turn out — and still pay — to make their case.

The Messi legacy the vote is really about

Strip away the percentages and the B.O.A.T. contest is really a debate about what a Ballon d'Or legacy means. Messi's eight titles — spanning from 2009 through 2023 — are the most any player has ever won, and they map almost perfectly onto the arc of his career: the Barcelona treble years, the Pep Guardiola machine, the Neymar-Suárez front line, and finally the 2023 award that crowned his World Cup triumph in Qatar.

Ronaldo's five, won with three different clubs in two different leagues, tell a different story — one of reinvention. Each of his titles came in a different jersey, which may be part of why his 2008 season commands such a concentrated vote: it is the founding chapter of the legend, before everything that followed.

And there could be one more chapter still to come. Messi's red-hot Inter Miami form has revived talk of a ninth Ballon d'Or at the end of the year, with some outlets arguing his late-season numbers deserve serious consideration. Whether or not that comes to pass, the B.O.A.T. vote shows his legend is being litigated on every front at once.

For now, though, the greatest Ballon d'Or winner ever is being decided one euro at a time — and Ronaldo is winning the auction.

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