Bruno Fernandes was placed 27th in the 2026 Ballon d\u2019Or rankings on Monday night, a reminder that individual recognition can arrive at an awkward time. The Manchester United captain learned of his position the day after being left on the bench for the defeat to Bournemouth, a result that deepened an already difficult week.<\/p>\n
The Portuguese midfielder\u2019s season, though, was built on rare production. Across the 38-game campaign, he created 21 goals, setting a new benchmark and moving beyond the previous high of 20 assists, a mark held by Thierry Henry from 2002-03 and matched by Kevin De Bruyne in 2019-20. Fernandes was then rewarded with a clean sweep of the FWA Footballer of the Year, PFA Players\u2019 Player of the Year and Premier League Player of the Season awards, along with a club-record fifth Sir Matt Busby Player of the Year honour.<\/p>\n
Before the ceremony at the London Palladium, the players outside the top 10 were unveiled in reverse order. Votes came from 100 journalists, one from each of FIFA\u2019s top 100-ranked national teams, and Fernandes ultimately finished behind the leading names in the count. He was only above William Saliba and Sadio Man\u00e9, who shared 29th, and Juli\u00e1n Qui\u00f1ones in 28th place. Declan Rice, who had lost out to Fernandes in the domestic awards, ended up 13 places higher.<\/p>\n
This was Fernandes\u2019s second Ballon d\u2019Or nomination, following his inclusion in 2021. That year he finished equal 21st, just ahead of Harry Kane and Luka Modri\u0107 among others.<\/p>\n
His profile has changed since then. In 2020-21, Fernandes was scoring with far greater regularity, finishing with 28 goals in all competitions as Manchester United came second in the Premier League. Even so, nomination alone remains significant, with fewer than 0.1% of professional players ever reaching that stage.<\/p>\n
Manchester United\u2019s history in the award is well established. Denis Law was the club\u2019s first winner in 1964 after scoring 46 times in 1963-64, while Bobby Charlton claimed the prize in 1966 after playing a major role in England\u2019s World Cup triumph.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fernandes finished 27th in the Ballon d\u2019Or, despite a record-setting season of creativity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22082,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,2025],"tags":[1162,59,180],"class_list":["post-22083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-manchester-united","category-player-rankings","tag-analytics","tag-featured","tag-player-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}