And the winner is … not Sam Kerr. Again. For the fourth year in a row, the Matildas skipper and Chelsea goal machine has been overlooked for football’s highest individual honour.
Any Australian fans who got up early on Tuesday to watch the Ballon d’Or ceremony live from Paris, hoping for a little glimpse of history, were left sobbing into their Weet-Bix. Kerr came third – again – behind Arsenal’s Beth Mead, as Barcelona’s Spanish wizard Alexia Putellas won the women’s trophy for the second successive year. Karim Benzema took out the men’s equivalent, becoming just the second player outside Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi to win it since 2008.
What more does Sam Kerr have to do to win the Ballon d’Or?Credit:Getty
Kerr has repeatedly stressed she isn’t motivated by individual accolades. But surely even she must be wondering if she’s ever going to get on top of the Ballon d’Or podium.
The 29-year-old has been nominated for so many awards over the years that the ‘Honours’ section of her Wikipedia page should probably get its own Wikipedia page. It’s genuinely hard to keep track of her exploits: every other morning during football season, it’s as if Australia awakes to news of one more freak goal, brace, hat-trick or another key Kerr-adjacent landmark.
You could mount the argument, since it’s a very subjective topic, that Kerr has been the best and most consistent player on the planet over the last five or so years – men included, too, if you wanted to be a little controversial. But the two awards that matter the most in global terms have consistently evaded her: the Ballon d’Or Féminin, and the clumsily named The Best FIFA Women’s Player, which she came second in last year.
Of those two, every player on the planet would prefer to win the Ballon d’Or. Look at the list of previous men’s winners: Messi, Ronaldo, Beckenbauer, Cruyff, Zidane, Baggio, Charlton. Even the winners list of the Féminin trophy, which was first awarded only five years ago, reads like a who’s who of the modern women’s game: Hederberg, Rapinoe, Putellas. (Interestingly, despite being regarded as the world’s best women’s competition, no player from the FA Women’s Super League has won it.)
Sam Kerr’s individual exploits aren’t enough – she needs to be part of a team that wins bigger trophies, or at least goes closer than Chelsea or Australia has, to claim the Ballon d’Or.Credit:AP
The reputation boost it provides is stratospheric, enough to take an already world-class talent into the most exclusive and prestigious echelon of players – and especially in women’s football, which is only now receiving mass coverage and the wider consciousness that comes with it.
Pre-Kerr, the idea of an Australian winning the award was fanciful. The boost a win would give not only Kerr, but football here more broadly, is huge. And there are no guarantees this country will ever produce another footballer, male or female, capable of contending for it.
The women’s Ballon d’Or is awarded by France Football magazine, and decided by a worldwide vote of 50 journalists (100 for the men’s trophy) – one each from FIFA’s top 50-ranked nations, most of which are European. This year was also the first time the award was based on performances across the typical European season (August to July), rather than a calendar year. France Football asks voters to consider individual performances first, then team performances, then ‘fair play’.
You can see, then, where Kerr’s candidacy fell down. Putellas had arguably done enough despite injuring her ACL on the eve of the Euros. She scored an incredible 42 goals for Barcelona, to go with 23 assists, as they won every single game in a perfect Primera División season in 2021-22, and then also reached the final of the UEFA Champions League, where she netted their only goal in a 3-1 defeat to Olympique Lyonnais. Putellas, 28, was clearly the best player on arguably the best team in the world. And we haven’t even mentioned the other minor cups Barça won, or what she did for Spain before her injury.
So what does Kerr have to do? Individually, there’s not much she can actually improve on. Last season, she scored 29 goals in 31 games across all club competitions as Chelsea did the double in England, along with 10 goals in 10 international appearances between the end of the Tokyo Olympics and their second and final home friendly against New Zealand in April last year. She’s doing her bit, and then some.
Chelsea, however, crashed out of the Champions League in the group stage, behind VfL Wolfsburg and Juventus – an embarrassment which would have stuck in the minds of many European voters – while the Matildas badly flunked the Asian Cup with their quarter-final exit to South Korea. Had either team gone further, Kerr might have too.
The good news is she’ll probably be up there again in 12 months. While Kerr only has one goal from Chelsea’s first four games of the new FA Women’s Super League season, it’s only a matter of time until she explodes again; it’s just what she does. Their Champions League campaign also begins this week, in a group featuring Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Albanian side Vllaznia.
And then, of course, there’s a Women’s World Cup on home soil next year, the draw for which will be conducted this weekend. If Kerr can spearhead a deep run by Australia in that, and the Blues improve in Europe, the moment we’ve all been hoping for will be all the sweeter, and the wait will have been more than worth it.
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