The Numbers Behind Putellas's Case for a Third Ballon d'Or
Alexia Putellas enters Ballon d'Or season as a leading contender after Barcelona's quadruple, with data from The Analyst (Opta) showing her as the club's chief creator and progressor of play even as the shortlist draws criticism for overlooking the NWSL.
Alexia Putellas finished the 2025-26 season with a quadruple at Barcelona and a statistical profile that makes her one of the strongest candidates for a third Ballon d'Or Féminin, according to data compiled by The Analyst (Opta).
She has already won the award twice, in 2021 and 2022, and left Barcelona for London City Lionesses having helped the club lift the Liga F, the UEFA Women's Champions League, the Copa de la Reina and the Supercopa de España in a single campaign, a run completed while three-time winner Aitana Bonmatí was out for five months.
That context matters. A team missing its reigning Ballon d'Or holder for a third of the season and still sweeping every competition points to another player filling the creative void, and the data puts Putellas squarely at the centre of that shift.
Why the raw numbers only tell half the story
Across all competitions she scored 21 goals and added 13 assists, third and second respectively among all players measured by The Analyst. She created 89 chances, 19 of them rated as big chances, and her expected assists figure of 13.1 was the highest recorded.
Goals and assists are the figures that travel furthest, but they undersell what made Putellas indispensable. Her 965 passes ending in the final third was the highest total of any player across those four competitions, a measure of how often she was the one delivering the ball into the zone where goals are manufactured rather than simply finishing the move herself.
The season did not start that way. Putellas went without a goal involvement in her opening four matches of the campaign before her first goal and assist arrived against Espanyol in Liga F late in September 2025, per The Analyst's data.
Her value was in building attacks, not just finishing them
Sequence involvement is a measure of how often a player touches the ball during passages of open-play possession that end in a shot. Across Europe's top five leagues, only Clàudia Pina (199), Vicky López (183) and Manchester City's Georgia Stanway (168) were involved in more such sequences than Putellas's 151, underlining how central she was to Barcelona's build-up even when the move did not finish through her.
Her passing numbers reinforce the same picture. Only teammate Clara Serrajordi and Bayern Munich's Stanway completed more passes in the opposition half than her 931 from 1,140 attempts, and she ranked first for passes ending in the final third with 780, third for those that successfully found the zone with 599.
In Liga F specifically she was joint-sixth for assists with seven and fourth for open-play chances created with 40, modest by comparison with her continental numbers but still evidence of sustained influence in a competition she helped Barcelona win outright.
The Champions League form that settled the argument
If her domestic numbers made the case, her Champions League campaign closed it. Putellas was involved in more open-play attacking sequences than anyone else in the competition, 97 in total, while scoring eight goals, a tally only two players bettered, and supplying six assists, second only to Bayern's Klara Bühl.
Only Barcelona teammate Mapi León completed more passes in the opposition half across the competition than Putellas's 462, and nobody created more chances than her in the tournament, with Bühl the only player to come close.
Taken together, the figures describe a player who was not merely Barcelona's best finisher but their principal means of moving the ball into dangerous areas, a distinction that matters when judging an individual award built around a team triumph.
A crowded field and a shortlist under scrutiny
Putellas is not without rivals. Khadija Shaw led Europe's top five leagues for goals with 21 and ranked second for goal involvements with 25 as Manchester City won their first WSL title in over a decade. Bühl topped the continent for both assists, with 14, and chances created, with 60. Pina finished as Liga F's leading scorer.
The 2026 shortlist has also drawn criticism for its treatment of the NWSL, with only a handful of its players included among the 30 nominees, The Analyst reported. Washington Spirit's Trinity Rodman ranked first among NWSL players for goal involvements with 21 and second for goals with 14 across the assessment period, yet did not make the list, while Cloé Lacasse, Croix Bethune and Pietra Tordin, each with nine assists, were also omitted.
Part of the difficulty is structural: the NWSL season runs from February to November, which does not map cleanly onto the Ballon d'Or's assessment window of 3 August 2025 to 19 July 2026, potentially disadvantaging players whose best form fell outside the counted stretch.
That mismatch does not settle whether the voting panel, drawn from journalists in FIFA's top 100 ranked countries, weighs European performances too heavily, but it does explain why the debate resurfaces every year the shortlist is published.
Whatever the outcome of that argument, Putellas's numbers from a title-sweeping season give her as strong a statistical foundation as any nominee heading into the decision on football's most contested individual prize.