Ousmane Dembélé has been voted the Guardian’s best male footballer of the year for 2025 by a margin of 128 points ahead of Lamine Yamal. Considering our 219 judges handed out a total of 179,580 points (820 each) it shows how close this year’s ranking was.
Two-hundred and 16 members of the panel had Dembélé and Lamine Yamal on their voting slips but the main difference was that 101 of them had the Frenchman top while 33 had the 18-year-old Spaniard first.
For transparency we publish all the votes when the full list has been published. Click on this link to see the spreadsheet that shows the full breakdown of 179,580 points.
A reminder of how it works: we ask the judges to choose 40 names each and rank their selection in order from 1-40. The No 1 choice of each judge was awarded 40 points, No 2 given 39pts, down to 1pt for their No 40 choice. All the votes were added together to give a raw score. To minimise the influence of outliers in the list, the highest score awarded to a player was then deducted to give a final score.
To allow our judges the freedom to express their opinions without fear or favour, individual voting records are anonymised in the full breakdown of scores. Voters are identified only by their category and a number chosen at random. The judges’ numbers bear no relation to the alphabetical list of judges’ names presented above.
This is the 14th year we have done the rankings on the male side and last year we introduced a search engine for readers to be able to find how any player who has ever received a vote has fared. So if you are interested to see for how many years Wayne Rooney appeared on the list and what is highest ranking was please input his name in the table below – and the same goes for Xabi Alonso, Lionel Messi, Jamie Vardy … or whoever you please.
