Roy Hodgson's Ballon d'Or ballots reveal a voter who ignored the obvious
A look back at every player Roy Hodgson placed in his Ballon d'Or top three as England manager shows a voting pattern built on tournament memory rather than season-long form, as detailed by Planet Football.
Roy Hodgson's four Ballon d'Or ballots as England manager, reported by Planet Football, read less like a ranking of the world's best footballers and more like a snapshot of whoever had just won him over at a major tournament.
In 2012 he backed Lionel Messi, who had scored 91 goals that calendar year, and followed the consensus again in 2013 by voting Cristiano Ronaldo top. Then came 2014, when Hodgson placed Javier Mascherano first, Philipp Lahm second and Manuel Neuer third, leaving out both Messi and Ronaldo entirely.
Why a destroyer topped his ballot
Mascherano's case rests on a single passage of defending: his last-ditch tackle denying Arjen Robben in the 2014 World Cup semi-final, a moment Planet Football cites as the likely trigger for Hodgson's top vote. That is the instinct of a voter rewarding a holding midfielder's job in its purest form, not accumulation of goals or assists but the prevention of a decisive one at the moment it mattered most.
It is a defensible instinct in isolation, but an odd one to apply to an award built on a ranked top three. Planet Football notes Hodgson was one of only two managers, alongside Belarus's, to put Mascherano top of their list. The Argentine was not even named in that year's team of the year, which tells its own story: a voting system built on individual ballots can still produce outliers so far from the overall consensus that the player being honoured never cracks the best XI of the season he is being praised for.
Why defenders and goalkeepers keep losing the numbers game
Lahm and Neuer fared no better in the actual outcome, even though both were selected in the 2014 team of the year, built around Germany's World Cup win. Lahm finished his vote-getting career without ever winning the award himself; no defender has lifted it since Fabio Cannavaro, a centre-back, in 2006. Neuer's case is sharper still: finishing third overall in the voting that year, the closest any goalkeeper has come, yet only one keeper has ever actually won the Ballon d'Or outright.
Both facts point to the same structural bias. Outfield attacking output is simple to measure and simple to rank; a goalkeeper's shot-stopping or a defender's positioning resists the same kind of tally, and voters, including Hodgson, have historically reflected that by placing such players high rather than first. His 2014 ballot effectively conceded as much: he spent all three votes on a World Cup-winning defensive core, Germany's title clearly shaping his thinking more than any club-season body of work.
The strikers who justified the ballot, and the one who didn't
Elsewhere, Hodgson's picks for out-and-out goal output stand up better. Radamel Falcao took his third spot in 2012 off the back of a prolific run at Atletico Madrid, finishing fifth in the overall vote that year, the highest Ballon d'Or placing of his career according to Planet Football. Zlatan Ibrahimovic was Hodgson's second choice in 2013 after passing 30 league goals for the first time, a tally of 35 goals and 17 assists across competitions in his debut PSG season, a mark he would go on to beat twice more.
Eden Hazard's third-place vote in 2015 is harder to square with form. Hodgson had him there despite a Belgian who had gone the first half of the following season without a league goal and finished it with only four. It reads as a vote cast on reputation built the previous season rather than the one being judged, the same tournament-memory logic that drove the Mascherano pick a year earlier, only this time there was no World Cup final appearance to justify it.
Several of these players' trajectories have since closed a loop of their own. Mascherano is now managing Inter Miami, with Messi, the sport's record Ballon d'Or winner, on his books. Planet Football's framing is that he may one day cast his own vote in the award, with Hodgson's example as a reminder that a ranked top three can reward the moment a voter remembers most, rather than the season the numbers actually describe.