The nominations for the 2025 Ballon d’Or ceremony have been announced today, and Liverpool are well represented across several categories!
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The main award has only been won by a Reds player on one occasion (Michael Owen in 2001), with second-place finishes for Virgil van Dijk (2019) and Sadio Mane (2022) the closest we’ve come to a repeat triumph, although the latter had joined Bayern Munich by the time of that year’s ceremony.
Having romped to the Premier League title last season, the Merseysiders are unsurprisingly prevalent among the shortlists for the respective categories.
Liverpool well-represented in Ballon d’Or nominations
The nominations were announced at lunchtime on the official Ballon d’Or channel on X, and four current Liverpool stars are among the shortlist of 30 for the men’s player award, with Mo Salah, Van Dijk and Alexis Mac Allister joined by summer signing Florian Wirtz.
Alisson Becker is one of 10 male nominees for the Yachine Trophy, while Arne Slot is shortlisted for the Men’s Team Coach of the Year prize alongside Antonio Conte, Luis Enrique, Hansi Flick and Enzo Maresca.
Liverpool FC are also in the running for Men’s Club of the Year along with LaLiga winners Barcelona, Club World Cup victors Chelsea, and the reigning champions of Europe and South America (Paris Saint-Germain and Botafogo).
Hopefully there’ll be at least one Liverpool winner at 2025 Ballon d’Or!
The Reds have rightly had their Premier League-winning endeavours recognised by claiming so many nominations – Jamie Carragher has made the case for Salah to finally scoop the biggest individual award in world football, and the Egyptian himself hasn’t discounted it – although winning the above prizes won’t come too easily.
They might take encouragement from the fact that, since 2018, only once has the main Ballon d’Or prize has been won by a player who lifted the UEFA Champions League trophy in the same year (Karim Benzema in 2022).
However, with PSG accounting for nine of the 30-man shortlist (including rumoured favourite Ousmane Dembele), there’s a strong probability that they’ll redress the curious balance on that statistic.
Slot and Liverpool have mathematically the best chance of winning among the LFC nominations based on objective statistics, so hopefully either or both will come away with the top prize in their respective categories.
When the Reds last won the Premier League in 2020, the Ballon d’Or didn’t go ahead due to the global pandemic – we suspect that some of the prizes would’ve gone towards Anfield that year had the ceremony taken place.
Hopefully there’ll be at least one Merseyside-based victor among the various categories when the winners are announced on 22 September!
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