Ranking every Ballon d’Or winner signed by Real Madrid as Rodri hints at move | OneFootball

Rodri has become the latest player to make his desire to join Real Madrid public, but how good were the other Ballon d’Or winners before they moved to the Spanish capital?

Should he make the switch from Manchester City this summer, Rodri would be the seventh Ballon d’Or winner to join the Spanish giants.

So we’ve ranked the previous six based on how good they were before they made the move.

6. Fabio Cannavaro

Technically Cannavaro was a Madrid player when he won the Ballon d’Or but what won him the award was very much his achievements with the national team.

Cannavaro was the leader of the 2006 World Cup winning Italian squad and remains the most recent defender to win the award.

5. Michael Owen

The second youngest Ballon d’Or winner in history, Owen picked up his award as a result of the numerous goals he scored in Liverpool’s treble-winning campaign of the FA Cup, League Cup and UEFA Cup.

Owen scored 24 goals in all competitions at the age of just 22 and also produced for England including a memorable hat-trick against Germany in a 5-1 victory.

Talent-wise, he was a bit limited compared to others on this list, but the achievement at such a young age is impressive.

4. Kaka

One of the many incredible footballers to emerge from Brazil, Kaka possessed an exceptional blend of technique, skill, and speed.

The competition in Kaka’s 2007 win was ridiculous with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi occupying number two and three but even then, the Milan player got almost double the points of the pair of them.

He did so for his role in Milan’s Champions League win in which they avenged the demons of the Istanbul final.

Domestically, Milan finished fourth in Serie A, but Kaka was widely recognised as the best player on the planet at the time. His win was also the final one before a 10-year Messi/Ronaldo dominance.

3. Ronaldo

Described by Jose Mourinho as the best player to ever kick a ball, Ronaldo was everything you could want from a striker.

Fast, powerful, skilful and incredibly clinical, he hit the top of his game at Madrid but there were signs long before that of his brilliance.

An impressive stint at PSV earned him a move to Bobby Robson’s Barcelona, where Mourinho was a translator/coach, and the goals never stopped. His stats now have been dwarfed by the Messi/Cristiano Ronaldo era but no one can deny his ability as a goalscorer and one who changed the position.

He earned his first Ballon d’Or in 1997 while at Inter Milan before being signed by Madrid in 2002 where he would go on to win another.

Does he deserve to be higher? Maybe so on talent alone but others had longer careers at the very top.

2. Zinedine Zidane

Perhaps to some, Zidane deserves the top but he makes it second on our list.

The Frenchman was ridiculously technically gifted and could often do things with his feet that the rest of us would struggle to do with our hands.

Him winning just one Ballon d’Or seems like an error in history, but that came in 1998 when he played a starring role in France’s World Cup win. He scored two headers in the final as France overcame favourites Brazil.

He was playing for Juventus at the time before making the switch to Madrid in 2001.

1. Cristiano Ronaldo

Even without the technique quality of Zidane, it is hard to argue the worthiness of Cristiano Ronaldo being at the top of this list considering the career he would go on to have.

At the time of his first award, he was a winger at Manchester United and having initially been a young prospect with more than a couple tricks up his sleeve, by 2008, he had developed into a ridiculously efficient goalscorer.

In that campaign, which saw United win the league and Champions League, Ronaldo scored 42 goals and he scooped up six individual awards including the first of five golden balls he would eventually win.