The 2016 Ballon d'Or was an award given to the best-performing
football
Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...
player around the world in 2016.
In September 2016,
France Football announced that their partnership with
FIFA
FIFA (; stands for ''Fédération Internationale de Football Association'' ( French), meaning International Association Football Federation ) is the international governing body of association football, beach football and futsal. It was found ...
for the
FIFA Ballon d'Or award had come to an end and that they would revive the
Ballon d'Or award, treating the 2016 edition as the 61st award.
France Football announced that they would publish a shortlist of 30 players across six announcements with two hour intervals on 24 October 2016. On 12 December 2016,
Cristiano Ronaldo won the award by a record margin of 429 points ahead of second placed
Lionel Messi and
Antoine Griezmann, who came third.
There were 173 voters. All were journalists, in a change from previous years, and each voter was from a different country. Each voter voted for three players who received 5 points, 3 points and one point respectively.
Ronaldo scored 745 points out of a maximum possible of 865. It was his fourth
Ballon d'Or, the most of any European player in the history of the award.
Rankings
Sources:
References
{{Ballon d'Or recipients
2016
File:2016 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: Bombed-out buildings in Ankara following the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt; the impeachment trial of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff; Damaged houses during the 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh ...
2016 in association football
2016 sports awards