In the third week of May, with his second Premier League winner's medal in his stacked trophy cabinet, and his third Footballer of the Year award for outstanding performance in England safely banked, Mohamed Salah addressed the possibilities of winning the Ballon d’Or, the most prestigious individual prize in his sport.
“I’ve never had a season like this,” he reflected of his brilliant 2024-25. “I would say it’s my best chance to get it.” If he were to win it, he told France Football, the magazine who organise the prize, it would “be for his people. When you come from a village in Egypt, it’s hard even to dream of winning a Ballon d’Or.”
Nine days after Salah was talking up his chances, the compelling arguments made by his 32 goals and 23 assists in 59 matches for a Liverpool who galloped away with the Premier League, a powerful case was being made that the prize should go to another part of North Africa, to Morocco.
Achraf Hakimi was scoring the opener of the most one-sided Uefa Champions League final in history, Paris Saint-Germain’s 5-0 rout of Inter Milan. It was the dynamic right-back’s third goal in the space of four European Cup games and one of the 11 he registered in 2024-25.
That’s in addition to his 16 assists across the three competitions PSG triumphed in - they were league and Cup winners too - and the Club World Cup, where they reached the final. “There’s not a lot of players who have scored in the quarter-final, the semi and the final of the Champions League,” Hakimi observed. “And that’s even harder if you are a defender.
“When a defender does all that, it carries more merit than when a forward does. When people put me in the running for a Ballon d’Or, it’s obviously a dream,” Hakimi told Canal+. “But I also think I deserve it to be a possibility after such a historic season.”
This sort of lobbying, advertising your own credentials, has become part of the show around the Ballon d’Or, a prize where there’s an electorate - 100 football journalists from 100 different countries - to be persuaded and where any player whose career has coincided with Cristiano Ronaldo’s or Lionel Messi’s has learned the hard way it’s vital to capitalise on a peak period of form, the season that might catapult you up the polling.
Hakimi, 26, began his rise to becoming probably the best right-back in the world when he was a teenager in the same Real Madrid team as Ronaldo, then in possession of his fifth Ballon d’Or; he was a teammate of Messi in Paris when Messi won his eighth.
Salah, 33, has finished in the top 10 of the voting four times, three of those while looking up the rankings at the names of Ronaldo or Messi. Had they not been around, the Egyptian might have been closer, before now, to a place in the top three.
As it is, there is a slender possibility that, with Ronaldo and Messi no longer swapping the Ballon d’Or exclusively with one another, two footballers from Arab nations might for the first time feature together in the top three when the votes are revealed at a gala event in Paris on Monday night. Both Salah and Hakimi would be deserving.
But the forecasts suggest that the dazzle of Lamine Yamal, the Barcelona prodigy who, like Salah, played a major part in his club’s winning their domestic league, might leapfrog them both and, above all that, while Hakimi’s contributions to PSG’s achievements were outstanding, the preferred flag-bearer for that club’s brilliant 2024-25 is the striker Ousmane Dembele.
Attacking players tend to draw the limelight more than defenders, even ones as creative as Hakimi and Dembele’s 35 PSG goals, out of 51 goal contributions last season make him the expected Ballon d’Or victor.
And he has a comeback story to tell. At 28, Dembele has come good, via many ups and downs, on predictions that were being made for him a decade ago. At Rennes, where he enrolled in the junior ranks at 14, he was called “the next Ronaldo” although that was not a view shared by all the club’s senior coaching staff.
A brilliant first season in France’s top division made him a target for bigger clubs, including Borussia Dortmund, whose reputation for nurturing young talent is second to none. Their then head coach, Thomas Tuchel, remarked on Dembele’s “Ballon d’Or potential” when he moved there in the summer of 2016. His rapid ascent had him joining Barcelona, for the biggest fee the club had ever paid for a player, within barely a year.
Then came the plateau: significant periods of injury, a burdensome price-tag - Barca had paid over €100m, before add-ons - and a reputation for following up his exhilarating dribbles with wildly inconsistent shooting. It took close to five years for Barcelona to enjoy the long runs of dazzling form they had invested in. PSG saw the mature version of Dembele and swooped, signing him for around €50m in the summer of 2023.
A shift from the wing into a central striking role, albeit with licence to go wide, once Kylian Mbappe had left PSG last year, helped turn Dembele into the reliable finisher that had been the missing part of his portfolio, a devastating complement to his speed, his capacity to go past defenders. He has thrived in front of a confident midfield and benefited immensely from Hakimi’s energy and movement.
A trio of PSG midfielders, Vitinha, Fabian Ruiz and Joao Neves are among seven players from the club in the 30-man list of Ballon d’Or nominees. While the concentration of Parisien excellence leaves open the possibility that votes might be spread across the PSG contingent to such an extent that a candidate, like Lamine or Salah, from another club ends up polling better than any of the European Cup winners, it is the Dembele renaissance that has captured the imagination. For that, he is the Ballon d’Or favourite.
