The FIFA Puskás Award has existed since 2009 and has been measuring the wrong thing the entire time.
This is not an accusation of corruption. It is an observation about mechanism. The award is decided by a split between an in-house FIFA panel and a public vote. Both of those instruments measure popularity. Neither of them measures difficulty.
The Premier League fingerprint
Five of the eight Puskás winners in one recent stretch were goals scored in the English Premier League. The Premier League is an excellent competition. It is not five times more likely to produce the world's single hardest goal than every other league on earth combined.
What the Premier League has is the largest English-language broadcast footprint, the most clip distribution, and the most engaged online voting base. The award's public-vote component converts that footprint directly into trophies.
The 2025 cycle broke the pattern, sort of, by giving the award to an Argentine overhead kick. But the mechanism did not change. FIFA's panel periodically pulls the spotlight toward a league it wants to promote. That is not difficulty selection. That is editorial rotation wearing the costume of merit.
What a difficulty-ranked award would change
Run the same eligible goals through the difficulty methodology and the winners change in a specific direction.
Free kicks would win less often. Goals from unstructured leagues would win more often. Tight-angle finishes against set defenses would win far more often than they do now.
Why FIFA will not fix it
The award works exactly as designed. It generates engagement, it distributes attention across leagues FIFA wants to feature, and it gives fans a thing to vote on.
The popularity award is better for FIFA's business. The difficulty award is better for the question the trophy claims to answer. Those two facts will not be reconciled, because only one of them shows up in the engagement metrics.