Lev Yashin Is the Only Goalkeeper to Win the Ballon d'Or in 70 Years

Lev Yashin won the Ballon d'Or in 1963. In the seven decades the award has existed, no other goalkeeper has won it. He also saved around 150 penalties, more than anyone has counted for another keeper, and won the first European Championship.

He kept goal for Dynamo Moscow for his entire career, won five Soviet league titles, took Olympic gold in 1956 and won the inaugural European Championship with the Soviet Union in 1960, where his performances against Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia carried the tournament. He played in four World Cups. He is estimated to have kept over 270 clean sheets.

The 1963 award is the whole argument in one line. Goalkeepers do not win the Ballon d'Or, because the voting rewards goals and the position produces none. It has been contested every year since 1956 and exactly one keeper has ever won it, at a time when the ballot was full of forwards from the great Real Madrid and Benfica sides.

What he actually changed was the scope of the job. Keepers of his era stayed on their line and waited. Yashin came out to claim crosses, ran out to sweep behind his defense, threw the ball to start attacks rather than kicking it away, and organized the back line by shouting at it. Every one of those is now standard practice and taught to children. None of them was standard when he started.

The counterarguments are about evidence and era. Much of Yashin's record comes from Soviet football, where statistics were less rigorously kept, and the 150 penalty saves is an estimate rather than an audited figure. Gianluigi Buffon played at the top of the game for 25 years and won a World Cup. Manuel Neuer took the sweeping idea further than Yashin ever did and won a World Cup and a treble. Peter Schmeichel and Iker Casillas both have stronger club resumes.

Those are fair, and any of them is defensible on a modern reading. What none of them has is a Ballon d'Or, and the fact that only one goalkeeper in seventy years cleared that bar is the strongest single piece of evidence available at the position.

The verdict: Yashin as the historical standard. Buffon for longevity. Neuer for the modern game.