"It used to be pretty easy to predict who would win the Ballon d'Or. You could just grab a coin, label heads as " Lionel Messi" and tails as " Cristiano Ronaldo," and flip your coin. Ideally it would be a slightly weighted coin in favor of the Messi side, unless it was one of the many years when Real Madrid won the Champions League -- in which case you'd want to reweight or relabel the sides of the coin -- but you get my point."
"In 1998, a decade before their dominance started, Messi was 11 years old, the tiniest kid playing for the Newell's Old Boys youth team, and he'd just started the growth hormone therapy that would eventually lead him to Barcelona. Ronaldo, meanwhile, had just moved from the island of Madeira to play for Sporting CP's youth academy in the Portuguese capital -- only to be diagnosed with tachycardia, a disorder where your resting heart rate sits above 100 beats per minute."
Ballon d'Or outcomes were once dominated by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who together won the award 13 times, with nobody else winning between 2008 and 2017. Predicting winners then often felt like flipping a coin labeled for Messi or Ronaldo, occasionally adjusted for Champions League outcomes. In 1998 both players seemed unlikely to reach global stardom: Messi was an 11-year-old on growth hormone therapy at Newell's Old Boys, and Ronaldo had just moved to Sporting CP and been diagnosed with tachycardia. The 2025 Ballon d'Or award sparks attempts to predict future winners, including speculation about 2035.
Read at ESPN.com
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