This year we had 218 judges from across the globe taking part in the voting for the best 100 male footballers, including former players such as Philipp Lahm, Karen Carney and Walter Casagrande.
It is a fiendish task: to pick 40 players and rank them in order of how good they have been this calendar year. As one judge once told me: “As soon as I have sent the list I find myself disagreeing with it”. Casagrande wrote a piece for UOL in Brazil describing how difficult it was.
The judges cast a total of 8,720 votes resulting in 178,760 points being handed out. Our winner, Erling Haaland, snaffled 8,511 of them, finishing more than 900 points ahead of second-place Jude Bellingham.
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