How does Golden Boy voting work? Nominees and format explained

According to the Golden Boy’s official website, its “famous panel” has “not misjudged a winner over the years”.

The likes of Wayne Rooney (Golden Boy winner in 2004), Lionel Messi (2005) and Sergio Aguero (2007) serve as potent examples of prodigious young talents that blossomed into senior stars. But it would take a very generous appraisal of the careers of Anderson (2008) or Alexandre Pato (2009) to suggest that the Golden Boy panel boasts a 100% strike rate.

Billed as “Europe’s most innovative award” (again, by its own publication) the Golden Boy singles out the best male player plying their trade in one of Europe’s top tiers under the age of 21 each year.

Here’s everything you need to know about how the famous judges come to their supposedly unerring decision.

Perennial Austrian champions RB Salzburg boast the most nominees of any club in Europe, with as many as five players on their books when the 100-player long list was revealed in June.

However, arguably the highest-rated member of that promising quintet, Benjamin Sesko, is set to join sister club RB Leipzig during the summer transfer window.

Prolific talent-spotters Brighton have four players on the list. A total of 13 are under contract at a Premier League club – more than any other division in Europe. Ligue 1 – which carries the slogan, ‘the League of Talents’ – is the only other top flight in double digits for nominees (ten).

Bayern Munich’s Jamal Musiala and Jude Bellingham, fresh from agreeing a €103m transfer to Real Madrid, are two of the favourites to snatch the golden gong. Reigning holder Gavi is also in contention to reclaim his prize.

After two decades of relying solely upon the received wisdom of international journalists, the Golden Boy has an element of statistical analysis coursing through the 2023 iteration of the award.

Initially created by the Italian sports paper Tuttosport, the Golden Boy has entered into a partnership with Football Benchmark. The self-styled “home of football business data” primarily focuses on the financial aspect of the game – player market value, club revenues, etc. – but has branched out to give the Golden Boy a statistical flavouring.

The 100-player long list was drawn up exclusively according to Football Benchmark’s “humanised algorithm”. FB ranked all eligible players based on three aspects; sporting performance, playing time and club strength before taking into consideration any involvement with the national team or in European club competition.

The end result was one number, between 1 and 100, dubbed ‘the Golden Boy rating’. Musiala recorded the highest Golden Boy rating of 98.3, closely followed by Bellingham (95) and Gavi (93).

There is not a great deal of detail about how FB came to this single number which supposedly sums up the myriad of qualities about a player. It is always dangerous when combining lots of information – FB vaguely reveal that they took into consideration “passing, tackling, scoring efficiency, creativity, etc.” – especially when judging players across all positions on the pitch and from 22 different leagues.

Nevertheless, the 100 names spat out of this black box are all under contention in the first round of voting. One month before the award ceremony in December, the long list is cut to the 20 most popular players alongside five “wild cards”.

The final decision is made by the aforementioned panel of 50 journalists. The exact identity of these writers is not revealed but they are said to have “20 years of experience” and hail from publications in England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Switzerland.

Tuttosport’s editor-in-chief Guido Vaciago loftily billed the new system as a combination of “human intelligence and experience with technological perfection”.