Aitana Bonmatí Wins Spain’s Third Consecutive Women’s Ballon D’Or

The winner of the FIFA Women’s World Cup Golden Ball, Aitana Bonmatí, has tonight won the prestigious Ballon D’Or award in Paris succeeding her FC Barcelona team-mate, Alexia Putellas, the recipient in the last two years.

In the voting, Aitana finished ahead of Chelsea and Australia’s Sam Kerr and two of her FC Barcelona team-mates, Salma Paralluelo and Fridolina Rolfö, in third and fourth. In her acceptance speech, she said “as role models we have a responsibility on and off the pitch, we should be more than athletes. Keep leading by example and keep fighting together for a better, peaceful and equal world.”

The result means that players representing FC Barcelona and Spain have now won the awards in three successive years. The FIFA Women’s World Cup winners Spain has become the first nation to produce two different winners of the women’s Ballon D’Or in its six-year history.

Aged 25 years, 285 days, Aitana is the second-youngest woman to win the Ballon D’Or Fémenin award since it was introduced in 2018 after inaugural winner Ada Hegerberg (23 years, 186 days).

Considered the most-coveted of the individual awards in international soccer, The Ballon d’Or, first organized by France Football magazine in 1956 (for women since 2018), is awarded based on three main criteria: individual performances and decisive and impressive character; collective performances and winning trophies; and class and fair play.

Aitana is preparing to play in tomorrow’s Nations League match away to Switzerland. She arrived with the rest of her international team-mates in Zürich last night and trained at 1100 local time in the city’s Letzigrund arena.

The Spanish FA gave her and Barcelona team-mate, Salma Paralluelo, special dispension to leave the training camp and make the 370 mile journey from Zürich to Paris for the Ballon D’Or ceremony at the Théâtre du Châtelet.

Last year, Aitana was one of five FC Barcelona players among the 20 shortlisted for the Ballon D’Or, but recovering from an early-season injury, she chose to stay in Spain to complete an extra-training session while her four team-mates travelled to Paris to witness Alexia become the first woman to win the award in two successive years. Aitana was ranked the fifth-best player in the world

Twelve months on her performances have made her presence as the winner of the award, rather than merely a nominee, necessary. With Alexia recovering from a rupture to her anterior cruciate ligament throughout the majority of the season, Aitana stepped forward to make the attacking midfield position for both club and country.

During FC Barcelona’s victorious UEFA Women’s Champions League campaign, Aitana was involved in more goals than any other player in the competition, recording five goals and eight assists. After the final victory over VfL Wolfsburg, in which she crossed for the equalizing goal, Aitana demonstrated her social conscience by displaying a T-Shirt with a message urging us to ‘Change Your Mind – Welcome Refugees – Save Their Lives’ after her work with migrant children in Barcelona for the UNHCR.

Aitana took that form into the Women’s World Cup, scoring three goals and assisting two more as Spain won the trophy for the first time. Her performances earned her the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player. During the 2022/23 season she won every trophy available to her with club and country except the Copa de la Reina, a competition from which FC Barcelona were excluded for fielding an ineligible player.

Just eleven days after lifting the Women’s World Cup, Aitana was the overwhelming winner of the UEFA Women’s Player of the Year Award in which she earned more than three times the votes of the second-placed Sam Kerr. After tonight’s Ballon D’Or she is widely expected to claim The Best FIFA Women’s Player award later this year, also succeeding her club and international team-mate, Alexia.

In August, she shared the winner’s podium with Erling Haaland, the Norwegian striker who’s goals propelled Manchester City to the men’s Champions League. Now however, she wins the Ballon D’Or alongside former FC Barcelona icon Lionel Messi, an inspiration for the young Aitana who arrived at La Masia, the training base for the club, in 2012, the year Messi won the fourth, of his now eight, Ballon D’Or trophies.

Speaking to me earlier in the year, Aitana told me that as a small girl she had been inspired by watching the diminutive Messi dominate matches for the club she supported. “I have always thought that football is not only for tall and strong-looking people. Football is for the smart and clever.”

Now, 11 years later, they stand together on the podium as World Cup winners, Ballon D’Or recipients and unquestionably the best players in the world.