Aitana Bonmatí has been voted the best female footballer in the world 2025 by the Guardian’s panel of experts. We asked 127 people in total, including players, coaches and journalists from all over the globe to create our definitive list for the year.
We asked the judges to choose 40 names each and rank their selection in order from 1-40, No 1 being their choice of the best player. 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.
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. Voters are identified only by their category and a number chosen at random. The judges’ numbers bear no relation to the alphabetical list of judges’ names presented above.
For full transparancy you can see a breakdown of all the 104,140 votes here. This is your chance to see how many points separated Chloe Kelly in 11th from Caroline Graham Hansen in 12th and how many judges voted for Lia Wälti, who finished just outside the list in 101st.
New for this year on the women’s side is your chance to search for any player who has received a vote since the Guardian joined forces with the Offside Rule podcast to publish the top 100.
Whether you are interested in Rachel Daly, Mary Fowler or Becky Sauerbrunn, they are all in our archive below, as are Pernille Harder, Wendie Renard and many, many others.
A searchable table of all players ever to have received votes in the Guardian’s top 100