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.