The Golden Ball award is dedicated to the best player in the world, which is awarded by Francis Football magazine to players every year, as this award has been in place since 1956,The French magazine (France Football) revealed on Friday that reforms had been made to the rules of the prestigious Golden Ball award, which is awarded annually to the best player and player, with reliance on the results of the 2021-2022 football season instead of the calendar year.

The award is presented at an awards ceremony in the French capital, Paris, and it was limited to men only until 2018, a preliminary list of candidates is drawn up and is supposed to include 30 players worldwide, and this list is drawn up by an editorial team in France Football magazine, the jury will be Smaller in size, and it will adopt an accurate preliminary selection and clearer criteria, according to the new regulations revealed by France Football in its modern version.

The past years witnessed a wide controversy over the winners of the Golden Ball award. Therefore, (L'Equipe) and (France Football) decided to make amendments to the main rules that would make the criteria more clear and transparent. The first and most important change revealed by the French newspaper is that the evaluation period for players will be on the football season, and not the Gregorian year as it was happening in past years.

These reforms come in line with the amendment that occurred to the football calendar by moving the date of the World Cup from the summer to the next November and December, with the aim of adapting the climate in Qatar, where Argentine star Lionel Messi won the award last year for the seventh time, a wave of criticism because some saw that the star Polish Robert Lewandowski deserved it more than Messi, as others saw that the Egyptian international star Mohamed, the Liverpool striker, was more deserving of it.

The top performers in it will be rewarded in the award edition for 2023, and (France Football) magazine stated in an official statement, that the best in the world will be chosen based on his performance during the season, and not throughout the year as was done in the past, as the magazine announced that it will reduce the number of voters, In order to fine-tune the process further, it will not allow voters to place the player's career achievements within the voting criteria.

The way to choose the winner of the title of best player in the world was through journalists, coaches and players around the world, where each of them chooses the best player in the world, but now the award is limited to journalists’ vote only, previously the list was 23 players and then it is Filter on 3 players only.

(France Football) made other notable changes, such as the introduction of the former Ivory Coast international star Didier Drogba in the committee responsible for selecting the shortlist of candidates, which includes the editorial officials of the magazine and the sports newspaper “L’Equipe”. The first criterion will be related to the player’s individual performance in the first place, ahead of the team’s collective performance during the season.

It is worth noting that the Argentine Lionel Messi is the last to win the Ballon d'Or and is the most awarded it ever (7 times), followed by the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo, who won it five times in his career, and Messi won the title after a fierce competition with the Polish, Robert Lewandowski of Bayern Munich. German.

Mohamed Salah performed a mythic performance with Liverpool last year, but his failure to win a collective championship made him seventh in the 2021 Ballon d'Or race, and for the first time since 2010, Messi's famous competitor for the award, Cristiano Ronaldo, did not appear in the list of the three names nominated for the award, and the player is considered Messi One of the best footballers of all time, he spent his entire professional career with FC Barcelona, ​​where he won 35 titles with the club.