MichaelEmilio · CC BY-SA 4.0
Winning the Ballon d’Or once places a footballer among a season’s defining performers. On 17 October 2022, Alexia Putellas won it for a second consecutive year. The Barcelona captain became the first woman to receive the award twice, following her breakthrough success in 2021.
The distinction reflected a midfielder whose influence reached well beyond keeping possession moving. Putellas contributed goals, created opportunities and helped organise the attacking play of a Barcelona side competing for major honours. Her role illustrates why a player need not be the designated centre-forward to become a team’s central scoring and creative presence.
The first award followed Barcelona’s outstanding 2020–21 campaign. The club won the Women’s Champions League, and Putellas scored its second goal in the final in Gothenburg. Individual recognition that year also included UEFA’s Women’s Player of the Year award and the Champions League midfielder honour.
The following season presented a different mixture of success and disappointment. Barcelona completed the Spanish league and cup double and won the Spanish Super Cup. In Europe, however, the team lost the Champions League final to Lyon. The second Ballon d’Or did not require that every important match end in victory; it recognised the scale of Putellas’s individual contribution across the season.
LaLiga’s contemporary account credited her with 34 goals that season. For a midfielder, such output added another dimension to her influence. She could help construct an attack and also finish it, making her involvement difficult to describe through a single conventional role on a team sheet.
Her connection with the club had developed over many years. She joined Barcelona in 2012 after playing for Levante, arriving at 18. The consecutive awards therefore marked the culmination of a long period of growth within the team, rather than a sudden appearance at its summit.
Putellas’s achievement also mattered to the history of the women’s award itself. A repeat winner established a new benchmark for continuity at the top. The word “consecutive” is important: it describes recognition across two successive editions, not two isolated high points separated by an extended interval.
The pair of trophies should still be read alongside the football that produced them. Barcelona’s domestic strength, its European triumph and subsequent final defeat supplied the competitive setting. Within that setting, Putellas repeatedly gave the side a combination of leadership, technique and attacking influence that award voters recognised in both 2021 and 2022.
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