FM24 - Ballon d'Or REWORK

Honestly, I'm pretty tired of how the Ballon d'Or works. In my opinion, once you've won it, great, that's it. You completed football. You've proven yourself as the best player in the world, it's not like you can really achieve more. Plus, the Ballon d'Or in it's current form is not much more than a popularity contest, especially the last 15-ish years, with the Ronaldo/Messi duopoly. Because let's be real, Messi was NOT the best player in the world, in 2023. He simply won the World Cup, and Ronaldo has faded into obscurity in Saudi Arabia, so it was "easy" for the decision makers.

This file aims to fix that. Once you've won the Ballon d'Or, that's it. You won it, now you can't win it, or even be nominated again. To quote an old meme:

"Football? Completed it mate."

This change gives a wide spread of winners, and ensures that Haaland/Mbappé doesn't win it every year once Messi is gone. Combined with my "Fixed PA" to "PA Ranges" file, it will give you a huge variety of winners, from save file to save file.

I also edited the history of the Ballon d'Or to follow these same rules. Once a player has won it, he is removed from the running in following years. Now, usually, this doesn't really cause much fuss - Pretty much every winner, even with these rules, you could go "Yeah, that's fair, it was a tight race". However, it also results in winners like, well... This:



But frankly, that's the only result that made me do a double-take. The most "distant" winner is Radamel Falcao, who finished 5th in 2012, who won it instead (even Jorginho was 3rd IRL). And yes, that is also Messi's crazy-season - But he'd already won it 3 years prior. Pros and cons I guess. But overall, I prefer this system to the IRL one.

Included in this download is also a file that prevents repeat winners of the Kopa Trophy. This hasn't happened yet IRL, but it is possible. Now it's not.

Also, both these files are .fmf files. This means that they go into your "editor data" folder, which is usually located at "\Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2024\editor data", or where-ever you've chosen to place your user data. But if you've placed in at a non-default location, you probably don't need me to explain this to you.

You also must start a new game to select this file and use, it won't work on existing save-games.