Our 241 judges from 71 countries cast exactly 9,640 votes in total to choose the world’s top 100 male footballers for 2020. Led by 27 current and former professionals boasting a combined total of 1,087 international caps, each member of the Guardian panel chose their own top 40 players from a long list of global names. These votes were then collated to create the Guardian’s 100-best male footballers of the year.
Click on this link to see the spreadsheet that shows the full breakdown of 9,640 votes.
To allow our judges the freedom to express their opinions without fear or favour, individual voting records are anonymised in the full breakdown of scores. The judges’ numbers are allocated at random and bear no relation to the alphabetical list of names. You can see a reminder here of the full list of judges and rules.
How they made their choices
• Our judges were sent a longlist of more than 300 players drawn from leagues on every continent and asked one simple question: who have been the best male players in the world in 2020?
• We asked our judges to choose 40 names each and rank their selection in order from 1-40, No 1 being their choice of the best player.
How the voting works
• The No 1 choice of each judge was awarded 40pts, No 2 given 39, down to 1pt for their No 40. 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.
• A player needed to receive votes from at least five judges to qualify for the list.
• If players are level on points in the scoring, the number of individual votes cast is used as a tie-breaker.