definition

The Ballon d’Or is football’s most prestigious individual honour. On Monday, Bayern Munich striker Harry Kane became the first Englishman to win it since Michael Owen in 2001. But his victory also raises a fundamental question about the award: How can individual excellence be fairly assessed in a team sport?

For much of the past two decades, that question has been overshadowed by the extraordinary rivalry between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. From 2008 to 2017, one or the other won the Ballon d’Or every year, turning the annual award into a contest between the two superstars. Messi eventually accumulated a record eight trophies and Ronaldo five, together accounting for 13 of the 17 awards presented between 2008 and 2025.

Their rivalry generated unprecedented excitement around an award first presented in 1956, when England’s “wizard of the dribble”, Sir Stanley Matthews, became its inaugural winner. But it also pushed several important questions into the background. Has the growing commercialisation of the Ballon d’Or distracted from its purpose? Why does it overwhelmingly reward attacking players? And why does a supposedly global award remain so heavily focused on European football?

The commercialisation of the Ballon d’Or reflects the transformation of football into a global entertainment industry, in which individual players have become brands in their own right.

“The whole dynamic of the Ballon d’Or has changed because the dynamic of the sports and entertainment industry has changed with the way individual athletes are marketed,” Steve Martin, founding partner of MSQ Sport + Entertainment, formerly of M&C Saatchi, told The Athletic.

“They’ve found a way as an individual athlete or player to build their own profile and their own fanbase, as opposed to relying on their clubs. They control their own destiny, and they market themselves.”

Former Switzerland defender Ramon Vega has been more critical of this development. “The commercialisation and monetisation of this award is not taking it in the right direction,” he told the writer.

The Ballon d’Or has undoubtedly become a bigger spectacle, but the attention surrounding the award should not obscure the question of what constitutes individual excellence. And commercialisation is not its only problem. The award has also long favoured players in attack over those in other positions.

A goalkeeper’s or defender’s performance is as important as that of midfielders and strikers, in a sport where a team is supposed to be as great as the sum of its parts. Yet Russia’s Lev Yashin remains the only goalkeeper to have won the award, in 1963, while Italy’s Fabio Cannavaro was the last defender to do so, in 2006, after captaining his country to World Cup victory. Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer and Matthias Sammer were among the few other defenders to have received the honour.

“Goalkeepers and defenders are also part of the spectacle. Attackers don’t just play amongst themselves,” Cannavaro told France Football after winning the award in 2006. “If a goalkeeper has saved 15 or so matches in a year, it’s only fair to highlight him.”

But the Italian’s observations have done little to change the pervasive bias of voters for the award, as strikers and midfielders on the European club and national team stage remain the yardstick for measuring global excellence.

That focus on European football points to another longstanding weakness of the Ballon d’Or: Its failure to adequately recognise outstanding players from elsewhere in the world.

For nearly four decades after the award was established, only European players were eligible to win it. This was a great injustice to exceptional footballers from other continents, even those competing in Europe’s leading leagues. The late Diego Maradona was perhaps the most notable victim of this exclusion.

The restriction was finally lifted in 1995, allowing players of any nationality at European clubs to compete for the prize. It took another 12 years, until 2007, for the award to be opened to players competing anywhere in the world.

It could be argued that when the award began, the club and national team game outside Europe was beyond the close observation and expert knowledge of the Ballon d’Or selectors. But that argument no longer holds water. Knowledge of the global game has grown exponentially, yet recognition of excellence beyond Europe’s leading competitions remains limited.

When Liberia’s George Weah became the first non-European player to win the Ballon d’Or in 1995, following outstanding performances for Paris Saint-Germain and AC Milan, his victory was expected to open the door for exceptional players from parts of the footballing world that had long been denied recognition.

But 31 years on, the former president of Liberia remains the only person outside Europe and South America to have won it.

“When I started playing football, I never thought I would ever win the Ballon d’Or and emerge as the best player in the world. I just had a passion for the game and I worked hard. Every day. I would rather train than eat or sleep,” Weah told the writer in Monrovia.

“I am surprised that no other African player has won the award since I did so. I think there have been others that deserve to win. But it is down to those who select the winners.”

Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o, the former Barcelona and Inter striker, now president of his country’s football federation, is one person with a right to feel aggrieved that he didn’t win the award before retiring in 2019.

“It’s difficult to understand how Samuel Eto’o never won the Ballon d’Or with the impressive career he had,” Jose Mourinho, who managed Eto’o at Inter, said in a 2019 interview with Cameroon Radio.

“He played in three Champions League finals, winning two with Barcelona and scoring in both finals. He also won one Champions League at Inter and won many league titles. He was the best striker in the world for several years, and I think he deserved a Ballon d’Or, but these are things out of our control.”

Eto’o’s omission, like Weah’s continued status as the only African winner, raises questions about how the award’s selectors and voters assess the achievements of players from outside football’s traditional European and South American powerhouses.

The Ballon d’Or already has an international voting panel, with journalists from 100 countries selecting the winner from a shortlist of 30 players. But geographical representation among voters does not necessarily translate into recognition of the world’s footballing talent.

France Football, the award’s organisers, should ensure that the process of selecting nominees and winners draws on a genuinely global understanding of the game and gives due recognition to exceptional players, regardless of nationality or where they compete.

The award must also address its other shortcomings. Football is a team sport in which goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and strikers all contribute to success, and individual recognition should reflect that. Nor should the growing commercial appeal of the Ballon d’Or distract from the footballing achievements it was created to honour.

The Ballon d’Or should be a celebration of individual excellence across all positions and all continents, not an award dominated by football’s biggest stars and Europe’s leading competitions. Only then can it truly claim to recognise the best footballer in the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

When a county judge put the brakes on what would be the largest data center in California, ruling the whole project needed extensive environmental review, Kristian Salgado was relieved.

The community organizer lives in Imperial County, where the nearly one-million-square-foot facility was proposed. The rural county near the Mexico border struggles with bad air pollution and has one the state’s highest rates of asthma hospitalization for kids, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. One of Salgado’s nephews lives right next to the site and struggles with the respiratory disease.

“It just seemed very unusual that a project of this scale, with that many backup generators could be permitted without requiring any further [analysis] of what that would mean for residents,” she said.

Now, Salgado and others who share her concern believe Proposition 45 on the November ballot could roll back their wins. The initiative changes the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, a law intended to inform decision makers and the public about a project’s possible environmental impacts — and mitigate them to the extent possible.

Supporters say Prop 45 will speed up environmental review for essential housing, transportation, water, health, education and other projects, cutting costly delays and passing the savings on to consumers. Opponents say it not only weakens environmental protections for many developments, but will cover potentially polluting ones — including data centers. The Yes on 45 campaign forcefully rejects the data center claim, but independent legal experts are divided.

At the heart of the debate is the definition of one of the categories covered by Prop 45: “broadband internet access projects” or “mass-market retail service … that provides the capability to transmit data to, and receive data from, all or substantially all internet endpoints.”

Dan Dunmoyer, president and chief executive of the California Building Industry Assn., which supports the proposition, was adamant: “We specifically excluded data centers” when crafting the measure.

Yet the proposition expressly names certain excluded projects: nuclear energy, high-speed rail, jails and Delta conveyance facilities. Data centers aren’t among them.

Dunmoyer maintains that even if they’re not explicitly listed, data centers just don’t fit the measure’s definition.

In a Daily Journal op-ed, Rachelle Chong, a former Federal Communications Commission member, similarly argues that the definition refers to internet access bought from a provider like AT&T or Comcast. “A conventional data center ordinarily performs an entirely different function,” she wrote, arguing data centers aren’t in play.

But land use attorneys Matthew McKerley and Richard Frank, in another op-ed, say many modern data centers fit the bill because they house equipment used to transmit consumer data to and from the internet.

They also highlight conspicuous campaign finance contributions, including $250,000 from Prologis, which developed two data centers in San Jose.

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley Law, said data centers will argue they fit the definition — and then it will be up to the courts to decide.

“Anyone telling you that it’s definitely not going to be data centers, they cannot read the future,” he said. “The way they’ve written the language, they can’t provide 100% assurance.”

Eric Biber, a UC Berkeley law school professor with expertise in environmental law, pointed to language in the measure requiring it to be interpreted broadly “to afford the fullest possible weight to the interest of, and the approval and realization of, essential projects.” In a blog post, he called it “a thumb on the scale” that could lead courts to conclude that projects should be covered when their eligibility is in doubt.

But Ryan Thomason and J. Scott Miller, partners at the law firm Mitchell Chadwick with CEQA expertise, think it’s likely courts would rule otherwise. In an article, they note that the definition used in the measure hews closely to another section of California law, which distinguishes providing internet services from offering content, services and applications online. “Courts generally interpret identical language in related statutes to have the same meaning,” they write.

Dunmoyer, of the California Building Industry Ass., stressed that the measure doesn’t overthrow local zoning rules.

Opponents are “making it sound like in your backyard will be a data center,” he said. “Well, that doesn’t happen at all by this initiative. That has to happen by a county board of supervisors voting to put a data center in your backyard. And if they decide to do that, this initiative does nothing to expedite that CEQA review.”

But what if local officials run afoul of their constituents? In the case of the Imperial Valley Data Center Campus, the roughly 75 acres of unincorporated land where it would go had already been zoned for data centers. As a result, county officials said they had the power to move forward with the facility for artificial intelligence computing infrastructure without city approval.

They granted the project an exemption from the state environmental review.

Then came the backlash. Residents spoke out at public meetings, rallied on the streets, circulated a petition and formed a community organization. The city of Imperial and the Sierra Club sued. In the wake of the outrage, the county walked back its decision, declaring a moratorium on data centers. (The developer sued the county over the ban, and the county recently rescinded it following a court order.)

If Prop 45 passes — and data centers are covered by it — Eric Biber, of UC Berkeley Law, told The Times that such a moratorium wouldn’t be possible. That’s because the measure prevents state and local officials from changing the rules for a project once its application is submitted, he said. So if a community didn’t have a moratorium in place and its zoning laws allow a data center, “They’re done,” said. Existing bans aren’t expected to be affected.

Attorneys for the No on Prop 45 campaign argue that it could have real-world impacts for the Imperial Valley facility, saying the developer could claim the new rules apply. For instance, the measure would prevent courts from overturning approvals of qualifying projects because of CEQA violations. Courts would only be able to halt the affected portion of the project while the issue is fixed.

Sebastian Rucci, principal developer of the Imperial Valley data center, said he will fight for his project to move forward and that there’s an environmentally sound way to do it. He said he’s willing to negotiate and mitigate where necessary — but will not go through the CEQA process. If push comes to shove, he said he’ll move the project elsewhere. California could “get in the game” or be left in the dust, he said.

Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, the company behind the project, says it will create at least 100 permanent jobs and generate $28.7 million in annual property tax revenue.

CEQA requirements “are not about the environment,” Rucci said. “They may be for some, but they’re not for many. For many, they are about killing things.”