The Ballon d'Or Award is an annual award for the best international football player, awarded by a panel of selected journalists from the top football playing countries.

Who was predicted to win the Ballon d'Or in 2022? Leading up to the ceremony, this was a hotly debated topic, and there was a lot of speculation. We published lists of which players were predicted to win, and now we know the answer we can compare the predicted with the actual results.

Men's Ballon d'Or

How did the top football websites rank the contenders? We collated the opinions of a few of the top football websites to compare. The clear favorite to win the men's award was Karim Benzema, everyone predicted that, and they were right. The prediction for the other placings were more open. Kylian Mbappe finished 6th in the voting, though 4 out of the 5 predictions had him finishing third.

  1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th
ACTUAL Karim Benzema Sadio Mane Kevin De Bruyne Robert Lewandowski Mohamed Salah
goal.com Karim Benzema Sadio Mane Mohamed Salah  Robert Lewandowski Kylian Mbappe
fourfourtwo.com Karim Benzema Erling Haaland Kylian Mbappe Mohamed Salah Robert Lewandowski
eurosport.com Karim Benzema Sadio Mane Kylian Mbappe Mohamed Salah Vinicius Jr
footballtransfers.com Karim Benzema Erling Haaland Kylian Mbappe Mohamed Salah Virgil van Dijk
the18.com Karim Benzema Robert Lewandowski Kylian Mbappé Kevin De Bruyne Erling Haaland
onefootball.com Karim Benzema Mohamed Salah  Kevin De Bruyne Vinicius Jr Sadio Mane

Women's Ballon d'Or

Predictions for the women's Ballon d'Or 2022 award were much harder to find, and the predictions we found were in much less agreement than in the men's category. Two out of the three predictions I found correctly predicted Alexia Putellas as the winner, and second placegetter Beth Mead was slated as top-3 in all three predictions.

  1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th
ACTUAL Alexia Putellas Beth Mead Sam Kerr Lena Oberdorf Aitana Bonmati
goal.com Alexia Putellas Ada Hegerberg Beth Mead Alex Popp Catarina Macario
eurosport.com Alexia Putellas Sam Kerr Beth Mead Ada Hegerberg -
the18.com Beth Mead Alexandra Popp Lucy Bronze Alex Morgan Alexia Putellas