Sometimes it feels as if it does not matter if you vote or not because your effort is not going to make a difference. Every now and then, however, there is a contest – whether that is the 2016 US election or the Guardian’s top 100 best male footballers in 2024 – where the result is so tight that a few people may very well have made a difference. The US election may be slightly more important all things considered but the fact is that this year there were only 68 points separating the top two in our annual countdown with Rodri receiving 7,495 points to Vinícius Júnior’s 7,427. Only two judges left Rodri off their top 40 (which is how many players each member of the voting panel selects) while three omitted the Brazilian. Ninety-two of the 197 judges had the Spaniard top while 72 put Vinícius Jr as their No 1. But this exercise is not all about the top five or even top 10 as 303 different players appeared on this year’s voting slips. John McGinn, Kévin Denkey, Yazan Al-Arab and Marten de Roon may have only received a vote each but at least one of our judges deemed them good enough to be in their top 40. Click on this link to see the spreadsheet that shows the full breakdown of 161,540 points. The document is also a chance to look at how close Dani Carvajal came to catching Florian Wirtz in eighth (very close: five points) and did Jude Bellingham (fifth) really finish more than 1,000 points ahead of Harry Kane in sixth? (He did.) New for this year is that you can also see every single player that has been voted for in the Guardian’s best 100 male footballers since we started in 2012. Do you want to check out Adam Lallana’s position in 216 just head over here and aim for the tab “Every top 100 male footballer ranking since 2012”. 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 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 2024? 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. If players are level on points in the scoring, the number of individual votes cast is used as a tie-breaker, then the highest vote received.