Vicky López retained the Young Talent of the Year award at the 70th Ballon d'Or ceremony in London, adding a second straight win to her season at FC Barcelona. The 20-year-old Madrid native received the trophy on Monday at the London Palladium, where France Football kept the award in the same hands for the second time it has ever been handed out.
Her 2025/26 campaign gave the award real numbers to lean on: 45 appearances, 31 starts, 12 goals and 13 assists. Those figures came while Barça built a historic quadruple, taking Liga F, the Copa de la Reina, the UEFA Women's Champions League and the Spanish Super Cup.
45 appearances, 31 starts
45 appearances was the clearest sign that López was more than a breakout name. She started 31 of those matches, then added the sort of production that decides individual awards: 12 goals and 13 assists. For a midfielder, that balance is the point — not just end product, but repeated involvement in the phases that turn possession into results.
Her fifth season at FC Barcelona also matters because this was not a one-off burst. The repeat award came after a full year inside a side that won four trophies, with López wearing Barça's number 19 while staying central to the team’s domestic and European work.
France Football and Young Talent
France Football has only presented the trophy for the best young female talent twice, and López has won it both times. That leaves the award with a very short history and a single name attached to it, which is unusual even by the standards of annual prizes that are meant to create a new winner each year.
Vicky López, 20, already sits at the center of that brief record. If the trophy is supposed to identify the world’s best female footballer under 21, her back-to-back wins make the bar for the next player higher than the ceremony itself suggests.
Barça's 2025/26 campaign
45 appearances across the 2025/26 campaign also show why Barça kept leaning on her. The club’s four-trophy season gave the award panel a player whose output was tied to titles, not just to isolated statistics, and that is usually where individual recognition becomes hard to ignore.
For López, the practical takeaway is simple: she has moved from prospect to the only winner the trophy has known, and she did it while producing across league, cup and continental competition. The next challenge is not whether she belongs in the conversation — it is whether anyone else can take the award away from the name that now defines it.
