In July 2020, France Football made the decision to cancel the Ballon d'Or due to disruptions caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Ligue 1 had cancelled the remainder of its season early in April, while the Premier League, LaLiga, and Bundesliga resumed after months of delay. France Football argued that comparing players across leagues with vastly different season lengths and match counts would be unfair.
Competitions like the Champions League had to switch to single-leg knockout tournaments behind closed doors, changing standard evaluation conditions. The temporary introduction of five substitutes per match and postponed summer international tournaments like Euro 2020 and Copa America further altered the landscape.
Rather than hold the traditional journalist vote, France Football replaced the 2020 award with the ‘Ballon d'Or Dream Team’. An international jury voted for an all-time best XI in football history instead of a player of the year.
At the end of 2020, FourFourTwo undertook the huge task of polling football journalists ourselves to reveal who the true winner of the Asterix Ballon d'Or was.
An in-house shortlist was created consisting of the 30 players who had had the best season. This was then passed to 101 football journalists from 101 nations, across six continents. Each picked their top five players for 2020.
If you recall, the Ballon d'Or's voting format changed in 2022, but prior to that, the system was: one journalist from over 100 different FIFA member nations picked their top five from a 30-man shortlist, with their picks earning 6, 4, 3, 2, and 1 point(s) respectively.
FourFourTwo's 30-man 2020 shortlist
Alisson
Trent Alexander-Arnold
Karim Benzema
Alphonso Davies
Kevin De Bruyne
Angel Di Maria
Bruno Fernandes
Serge Gnabry
Leon Goretzka
Erling Haaland
Jordan Henderson
Ciro Immobile
Harry Kane
Joshua Kimmich
Robert Lewandowski
Romelu Lukaku
Sadio Mane
Marquinhos
Lionel Messi
Kylian Mbappe
Thomas Muller
Manuel Neuer
Neymar
Sergio Ramos
Andrew Robertson
Cristiano Ronaldo
Mohamed Salah
Son Heung-min
Thiago Alcantara
Virgil van Dijk
The results
In what was an open-and-shut case, FourFourTwo proved Lewandowski won the 2020 Ballon d'Or with 561 points. Interestingly, the 441-point gap between Lewandowski and 2nd place (Kevin De Bruyne) would've broken the record for the biggest winning margin, beating the 429-point gap Cristiano Ronaldo won the 2016 Ballon d'Or by.
1 Robert Lewandowski (561 points)
2 Kevin De Bruyne (120 points)
3 Sadio Mane (113 points)
4 Lionel Messi (101 points)
5 Cristiano Ronaldo (98 points)
6 Manuel Neuer (69 points)
7 Virgil van Dijk (67 points)
8 Kylian Mbappe (64 points)
9 Joshua Kimmich (59 points)
10 Neymar (48 points)
11 Erling Haaland (43 points)
12 Mohamed Salah (42 points)
13 Thomas Muller (36 points)
14 Sergio Ramos (27 points)
15= Thiago Alcantara (23 points)
15= Serge Gnabry (23 points)
17 Ciro Immobile (21 points)
18 Son Heung-min (18 points)
19 Alphonso Davies (15 points)
20 Romelu Lukaku (14 points)
21 Trent Alexander-Arnold (13 points)
22 Karim Benzema (11 points)
23 Bruno Fernandes (10 points)
24 Alisson (7 points)
25 Marquinhos (4 points)
26= Leon Goretzka (3 points)
26= Andrew Robertson (3 points)
28 Harry Kane (2 points)
29 Jordan Henderson (1 point)
30 Angel Di Maria (0 points)