This year we had 218 judges from across the globe taking part in the voting for the best 100 male footballers, including former players such as Philipp Lahm, Karen Carney and Walter Casagrande. It is a fiendish task: to pick 40 players and rank them in order of how good they have been this calendar year. As one judge once told me: “As soon as I have sent the list I find myself disagreeing with it”. Casagrande wrote a piece for UOL in Brazil describing how difficult it was. The judges cast a total of 8,720 votes resulting in 178,760 points being handed out. Our winner, Erling Haaland, snaffled 8,511 of them, finishing more than 900 points ahead of second-place Jude Bellingham. For full transparency, we publish the spreadsheet with all the votes on it for our readers to see. For example, how many points Lionel Messi (in 10th) finished ahead of Bernardo Silva (the answer is one), or how many judges had Rodri as their No 1 (18). There is much to find out. Who ended up in 101st place? And did John McGinn really finish in 165th after the year he has had? Click on this link to see the spreadsheet that shows the full breakdown of 8,720 votes. To allow our judges the freedom to express their opinions without fear or favour, individual voting records are anonymised in the full breakdown of scores. The judges’ numbers are allocated at random and bear no relation to the alphabetical list of names. You can see the full list of judges and rules here. How they made their choices Our judges were sent a long list of more than 450 players drawn from leagues on every continent and asked one simple question: who have been the best male players in the world in 2023? We asked our judges to choose 40 names each and rank their selection in order from 1-40, No 1 being their choice of the best player. How the voting works The No 1 choice of each judge was awarded 40pts, No 2 given 39, down to 1pt for their No 40. All the votes were added together to give a raw score. To minimise the influence of outliers in the list, the highest score awarded to a player was then deducted to give a final score. A player needed to receive votes from at least five judges to qualify for the list. If players are level on points in the scoring, the number of individual votes cast is used as a tie-breaker.