Cristiano Ronaldo missed out on a 2026 Ballon d'Or nomination for the second straight year, with the Portuguese forward's last win of the award coming back in 2017. Cristiano Ronaldo is once again absent from the list of 30 nominees for the 2026 Ballon d’Or, confirmed on Tuesday by France Football, marking the fourth consecutive year the Portuguese forward has failed to make the cut for football’s most prestigious individual honor. The snub comes as Ronaldo continues his career with Al Nassr in the Saudi Pro League, a competition that has historically received little attention from Ballon d’Or voters. Ronaldo last won the award back in 2017, edging out Lionel Messi for his fifth and most recent Ballon d’Or, a trophy he claimed while playing for Real Madrid. That victory capped a run of dominance that also included wins in 2008, 2013, 2014 and 2016, cementing his status as one of the two most decorated players in the award’s history alongside Messi. Nearly a decade has now passed since that last triumph, and Ronaldo’s exclusion from this year’s shortlist underlines how far his candidacy has fallen since his move away from Europe’s top leagues. Cristiano Ronaldo shows his fifth Ballon d’Or trophy at the Santiago Bernabeu. (Getty Images) Still, while Messi holds the record for most Ballon d’Or wins with eight trophies to Ronaldo’s five, it’s the Portuguese forward who owns the record for most total nominations in the award’s history, with 18 compared to the 17 Messi now has after this year’s shortlist. When was Cristiano Ronaldo last nominated for the Ballon d’Or? Ronaldo’s last Ballon d’Or nomination came for the 2022 award, when he finished the voting without a single point from the jury despite making the 30-man list that year. It marked a sharp fall from the sustained excellence that had kept him among the nominees every year dating back to the early 2000s. Since then, he has been left off the shortlist entirely for four consecutive editions, missing out in 2023, 2024, 2025 and now 2026. It’s by far the longest drought of his career, having been nominated every single year without interruption from his debut nomination in 2004 through 2022, an 18-year run that this current stretch has now more than doubled in terms of consecutive absences.