It used to be pretty easy to predict who would win the Ballon d'Or. You could just grab a coin, label heads as " Lionel Messi " and tails as " Cristiano Ronaldo ," and flip your coin.

Ideally it would be a slightly weighted coin in favor of the Messi side, unless it was one of the many years when Real Madrid won the Champions League -- in which case you'd want to reweight or relabel the sides of the coin -- but you get my point. Ronaldo won five and Messi won eight. No one else has more than three, and nobody else won the award for an entire decade, from 2008 through 2017.

While all those awards were quite simple to predict over a short time frame, nobody could've predicted the Ronaldo-Messi duopoly until it actually happened. In 1998, a decade before their dominance started, Mes

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