Luis Suárez

Suárez remains the only Spanish male player ever to win the Ballon d'Or, and he did it in 1960 as the deep-lying conductor of Helenio Herrera's Barcelona. A year later he moved to Inter Milan and became the metronome of the Grande Inter — two more European Cups (1964, 1965), a machine built on defence that he alone made romantic. Later he managed Spain at the 1990 World Cup: one career, three acts, each at the summit.

The Spanish waited and waited for a second — through the decades of La Quinta del Buitre, through the galácticos, through tiki-taka — and are waiting still. That durability says two things: how high the bar Suárez set in 1960 was, and how completely he was the right man at the exact centre of European football's tactical revolution, the inside-forward who became the first true regista. The award has never again gone to a player so fluent in the game's deepest grammar.