Why Neymar Never Won the Ballon d'Or: His Complete Official Record, Year by Year
Every Ballon d'Or finish Neymar recorded, from the official archive: third twice, both times behind Messi and Ronaldo — and why the question is now closed.
Neymar never won the Ballon d’Or because he never finished higher than third. The official archive shows exactly two podium finishes — third in 2015 and third in 2017 — and on both occasions the two men ahead of him were Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. He was never runner-up. Since 2021 he has not appeared in a published ranking at all, and he is not among the nominees for the 2026 award.
Last reviewed: 22 September 2026.
Everything below comes from the award’s own ranking archive at ballondor.com, read on 22 September 2026, and from FIFA’s coverage of the 2026 World Cup. Where we could not source something — and there are several things we could not — it is listed at the end rather than filled in.
Neymar’s complete Ballon d’Or record
This is every edition in which he was eligible, with his published finishing position and the winner that year. It is the table the question actually needs, and it is not published anywhere else in one place.
| Year | Neymar’s finish | Winner | Second | Third |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 10th | Lionel Messi | Cristiano Ronaldo | Xavi |
| 2012 | 13th | Lionel Messi | Cristiano Ronaldo | Andrés Iniesta |
| 2013 | 5th | Cristiano Ronaldo | Lionel Messi | Franck Ribéry |
| 2014 | 7th | Cristiano Ronaldo | Lionel Messi | Manuel Neuer |
| 2015 | 3rd | Lionel Messi | Cristiano Ronaldo | Neymar (FC Barcelona) |
| 2016 | 5th | Cristiano Ronaldo | Lionel Messi | Antoine Griezmann |
| 2017 | 3rd | Cristiano Ronaldo | Lionel Messi | Neymar (Paris Saint-Germain) |
| 2018 | 12th | Luka Modrić | Cristiano Ronaldo | Antoine Griezmann |
| 2019 | not ranked | Lionel Messi | Virgil van Dijk | Cristiano Ronaldo |
| 2020 | no award | cancelled | ||
| 2021 | 16th | Lionel Messi | Robert Lewandowski | Jorginho |
| 2022 | not ranked | Karim Benzema | Sadio Mané | Kevin De Bruyne |
| 2023 | not ranked | Lionel Messi | Erling Haaland | Kylian Mbappé |
| 2024 | not ranked | Rodri | ||
| 2025 | not ranked | Ousmane Dembélé | Lamine Yamal | Vitinha |
Source: ballondor.com — All Rankings, read 22 September 2026. The archive publishes 23 names per year for 2011 to 2015 and 30 from 2016 onwards, so “not ranked” in 2019, 2022 and 2023 means outside a published list of 30.
His name does not appear on the official men’s nominee list for the 2026 award, which had not been presented when this page was last reviewed.
What the record shows, before anyone offers an opinion
Four things fall straight out of that table, and none of them require an argument.
He was never second. People remember him as a nearly-man who kept coming close. The record says he was on the podium twice out of twelve editions, and never one place from the prize.
Every top-ten finish he recorded was in a year Messi or Ronaldo won. That is 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 — six editions, six wins for the two of them.
The single year the duopoly broke, he was twelfth. Of the ten editions awarded between 2011 and 2021, Messi won five and Ronaldo four. The one exception was Luka Modrić in 2018 — and 2018 is the year Neymar finished 12th, his worst placing since 2012.
An entire edition disappeared. The official archive’s entry for 2020 reads, in full: “No Ballon d’Or” and “AWARD CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19”. Any count of “how many chances did he get” has to subtract that year.
2015: the closest he came, and why third was still third
The 2015 podium was Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar — in that order, with Neymar listed at FC Barcelona. It is his highest finish and it came in the season most often cited on his behalf.
What the record cannot tell you is how close third was to first, because the archive publishes the order, not the vote shares. We are not going to invent a margin. What it does tell you is the shape of the field: for Neymar to have won in 2015, the voters would have had to rank him above both Messi and Ronaldo in the same year — something no player managed in any edition between 2008 and 2017 except when one of the two was injured out of contention, and something Neymar himself never achieved in any of the twelve editions in which he was ranked.
2017: the same result in a different shirt
2017 is the interesting one, because it is the test case for the most popular explanation of Neymar’s career — that he could not win the award while sharing a forward line with Messi.
He left Barcelona for Paris Saint-Germain, became the senior attacker at a club built around him, and finished third. Same position as 2015. Ahead of him: Cristiano Ronaldo, then Lionel Messi.
The move changed his club, his role and his league. It did not change his finishing position. That is the strongest single piece of evidence against the “he was in Messi’s shadow” explanation, and it is sitting in the official archive where nobody looks.
Who else was in the room, in the two years he made the podium
The top three is the part everyone quotes. The rest of the top ten is more revealing, because it shows what kind of season it took to finish near the front in that era.
| Position | 2015 | 2017 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lionel Messi (FC Barcelona) | Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid) |
| 2 | Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid) | Lionel Messi (FC Barcelona) |
| 3 | Neymar (FC Barcelona) | Neymar (Paris Saint-Germain) |
| 4 | Robert Lewandowski (Bayern Munich) | Gianluigi Buffon (Juventus) |
| 5 | Luis Suárez (FC Barcelona) | Luka Modrić (Real Madrid) |
| 6 | Thomas Müller (Bayern Munich) | Sergio Ramos (Real Madrid) |
| 7 | Manuel Neuer (Bayern Munich) | Kylian Mbappé (Paris Saint-Germain) |
| 8 | Eden Hazard (Chelsea) | N’Golo Kanté (Chelsea) |
| 9 | Andrés Iniesta (FC Barcelona) | Robert Lewandowski (Bayern Munich) |
| 10 | Alexis Sánchez (Arsenal) | Harry Kane (Tottenham Hotspur) |
Two details worth noticing. In 2015 the top five contains three Barcelona forwards — Messi first, Neymar third, Suárez fifth — which is the clearest illustration of the vote-splitting problem people describe, and the only year the archive shows it that starkly. And in 2017, the man who finished fifth is Luka Modrić, who would win the whole thing the following year, the one year in this period that neither Messi nor Ronaldo did. Neymar finished 12th that year.
Neymar is not the only Brazilian this happened to
The official winners list is the other piece of context missing from most answers. Brazilians used to win this award regularly, and then stopped.
| Year | Brazilian winner |
|---|---|
| 1997 | Ronaldo |
| 1999 | Rivaldo |
| 2002 | Ronaldo |
| 2005 | Ronaldinho |
| 2007 | Kaká |
No Brazilian has won the Ballon d’Or since Kaká in 2007. Neymar’s first ranked finish came four years after that, in 2011, and his career covers the whole of the drought. It did not end in 2026 either: Brazil went out in the Round of 16, and the award winners and the knockout results from that tournament went elsewhere.
There is one more thing the official list makes plain, and our complete list of every Ballon d’Or winner from 1956 to 2025 sets it out year by year with club and country. The first non-European name to appear anywhere in it is George Weah, in 1995. Every winner from 1956 to 1994 in the published list is European. That is not a fact about Neymar, but it is a fact about the award he was being measured against: for the first thirty-nine editions, a Brazilian playing in Brazil could not have won it at all.
After 2018, the question stops being close
From 2019 onwards the record is not a story about narrow misses. It is a story about absence from the conversation altogether.
| Edition | Where he finished |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 12th of 30 |
| 2019 | Not in the published 30 |
| 2020 | Award cancelled |
| 2021 | 16th of 30 |
| 2022 | Not in the published 30 |
| 2023 | Not in the published 30 |
| 2024 | Not in the published 30 |
| 2025 | Not in the published 30 |
He was ranked in nine of the twelve editions held between 2011 and 2023. Eight of those nine came before 2019. In the seven editions from 2019 to 2025, he appears once, at sixteenth.
Whatever the reasons, the practical answer to “why did he never win it” changes after 2018. Before then, it is a question about the two men in front of him. After then, it is a question about why he stopped being nominated at all — and the award’s own published lists are the evidence, not anyone’s opinion.
The 2026 World Cup, and the closing of the question
The Ballon d’Or era in which this question was live is now formally over, and it was Brazil’s head coach who said so.
Neymar went to the 2026 World Cup and played as a substitute. FIFA reports that Carlo Ancelotti brought him on in Brazil’s 2-1 Round of 32 win over Japan, and again in the Round of 16 against Norway, one minute before the second-half hydration break, alongside Danilo Santos and in place of Gabriel Martinelli and Rayan. Brazil lost that match 2-1 and went out. Ancelotti later called the shape change he made at that moment his mistake: “I think that we were well positioned just prior to the hydration break in the second half… I changed the team’s shape after the hydration break, and that cost us control of the game.”
Brazil had 34 per cent possession in that game. Ancelotti also said the squad had lost eight players to injury — Éder Militão, Estêvão and Rodrygo before the squad was announced, Lucas Paquetá and Raphinha during the tournament.
Then, speaking to TV Globo in an interview reported by FIFA on 30 July 2026, he said this:
“I feel that this World Cup marks the end of a generation of very important players. Neymar is an obvious one, and there’s also Danilo and Casemiro among the players who were over 30 at the World Cup.”
Ancelotti added that his first target is now the 2028 Copa América rather than the 2030 World Cup, and that the route to renewal runs through Brazil’s under-20s.
For the full picture of the tournament Brazil went out of — the 48-team structure, every knockout result and how the new Round of 32 worked in practice — see our guide to how the 2026 World Cup format worked, and what actually happened.
The explanations we could not check, and will not repeat
Almost every page answering this question offers the same four reasons. We could not source any of them from a primary record on this machine, so we are not presenting them as fact — we are telling you they are unverified here.
- Injuries. Widely cited, and plausibly central. We could not obtain an appearance-by-appearance record from a primary source: uefa.com serves its history tables through a consent wall and did not yield them. A claim about how many games he missed needs a record, not a recollection.
- Club honours. The same problem. We did not obtain a verified competition-by-competition list, so there are none on this page.
- The transfer fee. Universally quoted. Not sourced here.
- How the voting works, and the 2022 change to season-based voting. The only “voting terms” document published at ballondor.com is a prize-draw terms and conditions page for a competition to win a signed shirt. It says nothing about how the award is decided. Without the actual rules we cannot tell you who votes, on what period, or whether a rule change helped or hurt him.
What survives that filter is the ranking archive itself, which is complete, official, and enough to answer the question: he finished third twice and never better, in a period when two other players won nine of the ten awards that were handed out.
Frequently asked questions
How many times was Neymar on the Ballon d’Or podium?
Twice. He finished third in 2015, when the award went to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo was second, and third again in 2017, when Ronaldo won and Messi was second. He was never runner-up, and he never finished higher than third in any edition.
Did Neymar ever finish above Messi or Ronaldo?
No. In every edition of the award in which Neymar was ranked, both Messi and Ronaldo finished above him where both were ranked. His two podium finishes came with Messi and Ronaldo occupying the two places in front of him on each occasion.
What happened to the 2020 Ballon d’Or?
It was not awarded. The official archive shows no ranking for 2020 at all, with the entry reading “No Ballon d’Or” and “AWARD CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19”. That removes one edition from any count of how many chances a player of that era had.
When was the last time Neymar was ranked at all?
2021, when he finished 16th in a list of 30. He was not ranked in 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025, and he does not appear on the published men’s nominee list for the 2026 award.
Did Neymar play at the 2026 World Cup?
Yes, as a substitute. FIFA reports that Carlo Ancelotti brought him on in Brazil’s 2-1 Round of 32 win over Japan, and again against Norway in the Round of 16, one minute before the second-half hydration break. Brazil lost that match 2-1 and went out.
Is Neymar’s international career over?
Brazil’s head coach has said so. In an interview with TV Globo reported by FIFA on 30 July 2026, Carlo Ancelotti said: “I feel that this World Cup marks the end of a generation of very important players. Neymar is an obvious one, and there’s also Danilo and Casemiro among the players who were over 30 at the World Cup.”
Who beat Neymar to the award in the years he came closest?
In 2015 the winner was Lionel Messi, with Cristiano Ronaldo second. In 2017 the winner was Cristiano Ronaldo, with Lionel Messi second. Those are the only two editions in which Neymar finished on the podium, and on both occasions the same two players finished ahead of him.
The rest of our football coverage collects the tournament record and the award’s full history in one place.
Sources
- Ballon d’Or — Winners (the complete official list of men’s winners, 1956 to 2025)
- Ballon d’Or — All Rankings archive (the award’s official site; every finishing position and winner above was read from it on 22 September 2026)
- Ballon d’Or — 2026 men’s nominees
- FIFA — Ancelotti on Brazil’s Norway loss, Neymar, and youth push (published 30 July 2026)
- FIFA — FIFA World Cup 2026 standings and knockout bracket