The full breakdown of 179,580 points dished out by our 219 judges, plus a chance to search for any player who has ever received a point
Ousmane Dembélé has been voted the Guardian’s best male footballer of the year for 2025 by a margin of 128 points ahead of Lamine Yamal. Considering our 219 judges handed out a total of 179,580 points (820 each) it shows how close this year’s ranking was.
Two-hundred and 16 members of the panel had Dembélé and Lamine Yamal on their voting slips but the main difference was that 101 of them had the Frenchman top while 33 had the 18-year-old Spaniard first.
For transparency we publish all the votes when the full list has been published. Click on this link to see the spreadsheet that shows the full breakdown of 179,580 points.
A reminder of how it works: we ask the judges to choose 40 names each and rank their selection in order from 1-40. The No 1 choice of each judge was awarded 40 points, No 2 given 39pts, down to 1pt for their No 40 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.
