Our 225 judges from 69 countries cast exactly 9,000 votes in total to choose the world’s top 100 male footballers for 2018. Led by 34 current and former players boasting a combined total of nearly 2,000 international caps, each member of the Guardian panel chose their own top 40 players from a long list of global names. These votes were then collated to create the Guardian’s 100 best male footballers of the year.
Click on this link to see the spreadsheet that shows the full breakdown of 9,000 votes.
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. The judges’ numbers are allocated at random and bear no relation to the alphabetical list of names. You can see a reminder here of the full list of judges and rules.
How they made their choices
• Our judges were sent a longlist of more than 500 players drawn from leagues on every continent and asked one simple question: who have been the best male players in the world in 2018?
• We asked our judges to choose 40 names each and rank their selection in order from 1-40, No1 being their choice of the best player in the world this year.
How the voting works
• The No1 choice of each judge was awarded 40pts, No2 given 39pts, down to 1pt for their No40 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.
• A player needed to receive votes from at least five judges to qualify for the list.
• If players are level on points in the scoring, the number of individual votes cast is used as a tie-breaker.
