September in football now comes with its own weather system: the Ballon d’Or shortlist lands, and the arguing starts. Paris Saint-Germain are at the centre of it again this year, with ten of the thirty nominees on the club’s books, according to PSG Talk. Which raises the question a lot of newer supporters ask and few can answer cleanly: how many PSG players have actually won the thing?
The honest answer is fewer than the club’s spending, its trophy cabinet and its recent European dominance would suggest. Two. That is the whole list of men who have lifted the Ballon d’Or while employed by Paris Saint-Germain — plus one enormous asterisk who deserves a section of his own.
PSG Ballon d’Or winners: the full list
Lionel Messi — 2021. Messi arrived in Paris in August 2021 after his contract at Barcelona expired, and by the November of that year he had collected a seventh Ballon d’Or. It was, remarkably, the first ever won by a Paris Saint-Germain player. The award was decided overwhelmingly on his 2021 with Argentina — the Copa America finally won, the international drought broken — rather than on anything he had yet done at the Parc des Princes, but the record book does not carry footnotes. PSG’s first Ballon d’Or arrived barely three months into a two-season stay that most Parisians remember with a shrug.
Ousmane Dembele — 2025. The second one felt entirely different. Dembele won the 2025 award off the back of the season that changed the club’s history: Paris Saint-Germain’s first Champions League, won in a campaign in which he was the pressing, roaming, chaos-generating focal point of Luis Enrique’s front line. It was a Ballon d’Or won for PSG rather than merely won at PSG, and it was the first time a player had been crowned Europe’s best for what he did in a Paris shirt.
Dembele has kept going since, too. He opened the scoring in the Champions League 6-1 demolition of Slovan Bratislava on 9 September 2026, scored twice, and set up two of Ferran Torres’ hat-trick goals. If you want the wider story of the man himself, our profile of who Ousmane Dembele is covers the road from Rennes to the Parc.
George Weah, 1995: the one that got away
Ask a PSG supporter of a certain age and they will tell you the club has three, not two — and they have a case. George Weah spent three seasons in Paris between 1992 and 1995, won Ligue 1 in 1993/94, and finished the 1994/95 Champions League as its top scorer with seven goals as PSG reached the semi-finals. That body of work is what put him in front of the France Football voters.
The problem is the calendar. Weah left for AC Milan in the summer of 1995, and when the award was presented that December he had been a Milan player for a matter of months. So the 1995 Ballon d’Or — the first ever won by an African player, and the first edition open to non-Europeans playing in Europe — is filed under Milan, even though the football that earned it was overwhelmingly Parisian. It remains the most painful piece of small print in the club’s history.
The nearly men
Ronaldinho played for PSG between 2001 and 2003 and won his Ballon d’Or in 2005 — at Barcelona, after Paris had let him go. Neymar came third in 2017, in his first season in the capital, and never got closer. Kylian Mbappe spent seven years at the Parc, rewrote the club’s scoring records, and left without ever winning it. For a club that has collected superstars the way other clubs collect academy graduates, that is a strikingly thin haul.
Part of the explanation is structural. The Ballon d’Or has historically rewarded Champions League runs above all else, and until 2025 PSG kept falling short of the final weekend. Part of it is that the club’s biggest names often split the vote among themselves — a problem that has not gone away, as this year’s shortlist shows.
2026: ten Parisians on the list
PSG Talk reports that ten of this year’s thirty nominees are PSG players: Dembele, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Ferran Torres, Vitinha, Fabian Ruiz, Joao Neves, Nuno Mendes, Achraf Hakimi, Willian Pacho and Marquinhos. That follows a season in which the club retained the Champions League, joining a list of only nine clubs ever to do it.
The omissions have caused more noise than the inclusions. Desire Doue missed the cut, and Olivier Bossard of France Football told L’Equipe de Greg that the young Frenchman finished “31st or 32nd on the list”, with the magazine’s editor-in-chief Vincent Garcia writing in L’Equipe that Doue and Bradley Barcola had been hurt by their “status as interchangeable players” and by a season “marked by alternating spells of good form and time on the bench”, per Get French Football News. Barcola, now at Liverpool, received very few votes.
So, will PSG make it three?
Dembele starts as the club’s obvious candidate for a second, though Kvaratskhelia has his advocates and Fabian Ruiz’s combination of a World Cup and a Champions League is the kind of CV line voters notice. The counter-argument is the one PSG have always faced: with ten names on the shortlist, Parisian votes have ten places to go, and split ballots do not win awards.
Two winners, then, from a club that has spent much of the last fifteen years trying to buy one. It took a European Cup to finally deliver it — which tells you rather a lot about what the Ballon d’Or actually rewards.
