Finally, Patri Guijarro is a Ballon d’Or winner.
In a sense. A sense that is technically hypothetical, based on the anonymous survey results accumulated by The Athletic, in which our reporters asked a bunch of people in women’s football — players and managers, past and present, coaches, sporting directors, scouts and leading executives from around the world — to select their top 10 from the 30-strong Ballon d’Or Feminin shortlist.
Guijarro came out on top with the most total points (15 points awarded per first-place vote, 12 for second, 10 for third and so on), finishing with 298 points in total. Manchester City’s Khadija “Bunny” Shaw finished second with 276, followed by Spain and former Barcelona team-mate Alexia Putellas (now with London City Lionesses) with 272.
Each voter ranked ten players in descending order of merit. The ten players were awarded
15, 12, 10, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 point respectively.
Note: Players are ranked by total points. Ties are broken by first-place votes, then second-place votes, then third-place votes; players still tied are listed alphabetically by last name. Bars show how many of the 37 voters placed a player in each position. The table lists all 30 players on the shortlist, including two who received no votes.
Again, this is hypothetical. Two-time Ballon d’Or winner Putellas — with her 26 goals and 15 assists for Barcelona and Spain, as well as Champions League, La Liga, Spanish Cup, Spanish Super Cup and Nations League trophies — is the favourite for this year’s Ballon d’Or according to pockets of the internet. The winner will be announced in London on Monday, October 26.
But our hypothetical winner is being announced today. Before we get into the weeds, some necessary notes on the data. Half of those polled are either based in or work mostly in Europe, meaning a potentially heavier European leaning when it comes to rankings.
Another thing to note is how difficult many of the respondents found this exercise. More than three respondents sent their 10-player list, only to resend updated and re-ordered versions the following day. “It’s so hard. You can make a case for almost all of them,” bemoaned one executive. They weren’t alone in this sentiment.
Even so, a general consensus has emerged within women’s football (and, most tellingly, within these results) regarding Guijarro: that the product from Barcelona’s famous La Masia academy has been systematically and criminally underrated. That Barcelona and Spain’s “third” midfielder deserves to be more than just Barcelona and Spain’s “third” midfielder, the one squeezed between and seamlessly fusing two-time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas and three-time Ballon d’Or winner Aitana Bonmati, all without her own Ballon d’Or.
Putellas considers her “the best pivot in the world”. One Liga F coach consulted for this piece called her “the key to Barcelona and Spain”.
Talk about the underrated nature of a player enough and eventually it translates into visible rating. Last season, Guijarro was crowned the best player in Liga F by the Association of Spanish Footballers. She was also crowned Barcelona’s best player of the season. The 28-year-old could place both those awards atop the castle she’d already built last season: Liga F, the Spanish Cup, the Super Spanish Cup, the Champions League.
Those respondents who ranked Guijarro first or in their top three cited the built-up appreciation for the player’s craft, vision and intelligence as a key factor in their vote. “I don’t think Patri gets enough credit,” said one international head coach. “She makes Barcelona tick with her positioning. Her understanding of when to speed the game up and slow it down is excellent. Her technical ability and game intelligence set her apart.”
That she did so largely without Bonmati, who missed most of the season due to a leg injury, was another significant factor. “With players having left and others injured or less of an influence at Barcelona, she became the most influential player in the team in terms of their longstanding identity,” added a WSL manager.
Guijarro was one of four Barcelona players to make the top 10 in The Athletic’s survey, testament to the unrivaled individual brilliance the quadruple winners boasted in the 2025-26 season and the manner with which they used it.
Guijarro’s Barcelona and Spain team-mate Ewa Pajor — who was the Champions League’s top goalscorer last season with 11 goals, including a brace in Barcelona’s 4-0 Champions League final win over Lyon — finished fourth in the overall ranking.
“Champions League top scorer, a double in the final and an assist for Barcelona’s fourth,” said one Serie A sporting director who ranked Pajor first. “She was the most decisive player of the season.”
A WSL manager added on Pajor: “The Champions League final finally confirmed she was one of the best forwards in the world rather than just potential. Not the best player on the list, but in my opinion the player with the best year.”
Many also spotlighted team-mate Caroline Graham Hansen, who finished in the top three of nine respondents’ lists, with one first-place finish.
“She was probably the strongest from a purely individual point of view,” said one Serie A sporting director. “Many goals in La Liga and the Champions League, huge continuity and weight in important games.”
Another player to feature heavily in the top three from our respondents was Lyon and Haiti forward Melchie Dumornay, the 23-year-old’s stellar individual performances in the Champions League, including the second-leg semi-final victory over Arsenal, having caught the eye of many around the world.
“She’s the youngest player I know that can win games on her own, similar to how (Pernille) Harder used to be able to do five years ago,” said one former WSL manager.
“A special player with excellent one-v-one technical qualities, there is always the sense something positive is going to happen,” added an international head coach.
Putellas’ impressive season, coupled with her already burnished pedigree and her leadership, means the now-London City Lioness was always going to be among the top three.
But Manchester City’s Shaw brought fierce competition and rightly so. Shaw’s potential exit from City upon the expiration of her contract in the summer was one of the only talking points among club executives around the world. The three-time Golden Boot winner is considered the women’s game’s most ferocious goalscorer and one of the key factors in City’s ability to knock Chelsea off their pedestal in the Women’s Super League last season.
“She has Sam Kerr's timing and positioning with twice the strength,” said one NWSL coach, who ranked Shaw top. “Her hold-up play is excellent. She’s strong enough to protect the ball but also technically good enough to turn or play combinations if you give her space.
“She combines these super strengths with the ability to run in behind and be a composed finisher. City wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what they did without her, not even close.”
Before last season, Shaw was often considered an underrated player in the wider women’s game, something one executive believes boiled down to her playing for Jamaica rather than a successful European team or City’s underperformance in recent seasons, domestically but also particularly in Europe, where the Champions League is considered critical in Ballon d’Or voting.
The concept that players who don’t represent European sides on the international or domestic stage do not earn the recognition they deserve in awards such as the Ballon d’Or is not new. In fact, that Temwa Chawinga or Yui Hasegawa aren’t higher up in the list is possibly a result of this, despite both players making history at club and national team level and being considered by many of the respondents among the best players in the world.
Kansas City Current forward Chawinga’s 15 goals earned her the National Women’s Soccer League’s top scorer award for the 2025 season, as well as its most valuable player for the second successive season running, all while helping Kansas City lift the NWSL Shield. Her five Africa Cup of Nations goals took debutants Malawi to the final, securing a berth at next summer’s World Cup in the process.
“She’s a player you can put in any team and will give you the same output,” said one Frauen-Bundesliga head coach and one of 11 respondents to rank Chawinga in their top three. “I don’t believe the rest are capable of performing at that level for every team.”
That an underrated midfielder in Guijarro was named by our respondents as this year’s winner is potentially good news for Hasegawa, another criminally underrated midfielder in the women’s game, but considered one of the best in her craft by many within it. Hasegawa’s performances at the base of City’s midfield earned them their first WSL trophy in a decade, as well as the FA Cup, while also helping Japan to Asian Cup glory for the first time in eight years.
Most of the top threes were similar: a rotating cast of Guijarro, Shaw, Putellas, Pajor, Chawinga, Pina and Dumornay, with intermittent appearances from Orlando Pride’s Barbra Banda and Bayern Munich’s Klara Buhl.
There were, of course, outliers.
One NWSL executive placed Gotham FC midfielder Rose Lavelle — the only USWNT representative on the Ballon d’Or shortlist — as their No 1. A WSL chief executive picked Arsenal and England striker Alessia Russo in the No 3 spot, the only time an England player cracked the top three of any respondents’ lists.
While Russo did feature in 14 lists in total, the dearth of England players was notable (City and England defender Alex Greenwood only featured in two lists). The lack of headline European national team tournaments, coupled with the lack of English teams in the Champions League final, are likely reasons for this deficiency.
Otherwise, the panel was pretty similar in its voting. What the real Ballon d’Or Feminin will have in store remains to be seen, but Guijarro, Shaw, Putellas and Pajor should be in for a tight contest.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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