Kevin Keegan

Keegan won back-to-back Ballons d'Or (1978, 1979), and he did it by exporting English ferocity to a German league built to resist it. At Hamburg he was the little engine of a team that won the Bundesliga and reached the European Cup final, a forward with no measurable advantage — average pace, average height, average finishing — who simply out-hungered every defender assigned to him. The headers he won against centre-backs a head taller became a weekly lesson in applied desire.

Liverpool before that: three league titles, two UEFA Cups, a European Cup in 1977 — Bill Shankly's last project and Bob Paisley's first. Two golden balls for a player with no physical superpower remains the award's purest meritocracy argument: talent matters, but hunger is a talent too, and his was the largest in the era's sample.