Six crazy Ballon d’Or rankings and where they should have finished

Sam Cooper 23 Sep 2025 9:45 AM

Three goals in 18 games gets you in the top 10 players in the world apparently...

The Ballon d’Or always throws up some inexplicable choices from the supposed best minds in the game and 2025 has been no different.

Sadly for us, France Football, who run the award, have done away with giving national team managers and captains a vote which means we won’t be having a repeat of Roy Hodgson picking Javier Mascherano as the best player in the world, but thankfully the journalists behind the voting still manage to put together some bizarre picks.

Cole Palmer

Kicking us off is the oddest pick of them all with Palmer somehow cracking the top 10 despite having a stinker since the start of 2025.

Before the new year began, Palmer scored 36 goals and registered 17 assists from his first 54 Chelsea appearances, but that number shrunk to five in the second half of last season.

The beginning of the new campaign has not been much better as he has just a couple of goals to his name and zero assists.

To make things even stranger, after his breakout season in 2023/24 he finished 25th in the rankings.

Undoubtedly, the Club World Cup played a big part with Palmer being named the player of the tournament, but even with that in mind, a top 10 finish is incredibly generous.

F365 ranking: 19th

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Raphinha

To go from arguably the second-favourite to win the award to actually being fifth is quite the drop for Raphinha, who had the season of his life.

While it seems hard to even think of him as the same player that once played for Leeds, Raphinha has matured and developed into one of the best wingers in world football and was the leader of a Barca team that won the league and reached the Champions League semi-finals.

Never mind all that success though as the minds behind the Ballon d’Or reckon that only makes him the fifth-best player on the planet.

While nobody is doubting the talent of Lamine Yamal, there is an argument to say that Raphinha was more crucial to their success last year, even if the young man is the more talented player.

F365 ranking: 2nd

Pedri

Anyone who has watched Barcelona for more than five minutes in the last year will be well aware that their team runs through one man: Pedri.

Yamal and Raphinha ahead may be the ones grabbing the headlines but Pedri looks like the second coming of Andres Iniesta and Xavi rolled into one, making his placing of 11th one of the strangest picks.

But as Iniesta and Xavi showed, midfielders tend to be outshone by forwards and considering those two all-time greats only made the top three on a handful of occasions, perhaps we should not be too surprised that Pedri is so far down on this list.

F365 ranking: 6th

Harry Kane

Harry Kane finally broke his trophy drought last season but the minds behind the Ballon d’Or reckon he was only the 13th best player in the world while he was doing it.

As Kane tends to do, he topped the Bundesliga scoring charts with 26, which put him fifth in the European Golden Shoe race, having played fewer minutes than any player ahead of him.

He was punished for Bayern’s relatively poor run in the Champions League as they were knocked out in the quarter-finals but his 11 goals show he was not the cause of that problem.

It is not even Kane’s best placing in the list as he was 10th in 2018 when Tottenham won, um, nothing.

F365 ranking: 8th

Mo Salah

While the red side of Liverpool say he should be even higher, we reckon Salah is lucky to even be fourth.

If the award was based on a calendar year rather than a season then Salah would have been a worthy contender for 2024 but he undeniably dropped off in the second half of last season.

He also did not make a mark on the Champions League knockout stages and although he scored three goals, all of them came in the league stage and were against Bologna, Girona and Lille.

In the away trip to PSG in the last 16, he was given a 5.9 rating by Fotmob, the lowest of any starting Liverpool player, and for the return trip at Anfield, it improved only to a 7.

Liverpool’s season also fizzled out and went from once looking like they could win the quadruple to ‘only’ the Premier League.

The reason behind Salah’s dip can also be pretty easily explained. No player played more minutes for Liverpool last season and it is no surprise that his best form came while they were still negotiating a new contract.

F365 ranking: 7th

Declan Rice

Have two free-kicks ever given a player a bigger PR boost?

Yes, Rice’s efforts to knock out Real Madrid were excellent but whether that meant he deserved to be ahead of Virgil Van Dijk, we’re not so sure.

While the Dutch defender captained his side to a Premier League title, Rice’s Arsenal came up short in every competition and the midfielder is one of few in the top 30 not to have won a trophy.

Ultimately, it is silverware that the Ballon d’Or most values, which makes Rice’s positioning ahead of Van Dijk a hard one to agree with.

F365 ranking: 28th (behind Van Dijk)

F365 Says Cole Palmer