The Ballon d’Or is an annual football award presented by French news magazine France Football.
It is one of the oldest awards in football and is
generally regarded as the most prestigious *individual* award for football players.
But despite the fact that the Ballon d’Or has become a staple part of many
football fans’ experience within the modern game,
less is known about the award, how it came into existence, and how it is bestowed.
In fact, if you dig beneath the surface a little,
you’ll soon find that the Ballon d’Or isn’t what you think it is.
Born in France at the tail end of the 19th century,
Gabriel Hanot played football for clubs in both France and Germany,
eventually picking up 12 caps for the French National Team in the early decades of the 1900s.
But after being involved in an aviation accident, Hanot hung up his boots and decided to make a name
for himself in the world of sports journalism. Working his way up through the industry, he ended
up working at two of the most established sports outlets in France–L’Equipe and France-Football.
Hanot was a visionary. At the beginning of the 1930s, he helped professionalise
football in France, setting up the league that would eventually become Ligue 1. In 1948,
having heard about the highly-successful South American Championship of Champions tournament
from some of his reporters, Hanot, then-editor of L'Equipe, began proposing the creation of
a continent-wide knock-out tournament. This proposed tournament would eventually become
the European Cup, a competition that we now know as the Champions League.
But Hanot was not finished. In 1956, along with a group of journalists at France-Football,
he helped set up the Ballon d’Or: an annual award to celebrate the best football player in Europe.
In the first iteration of the award, Stanley Matthews - then of Blackpool Rovers - narrowly
beat off competition from two Real Madrid players, Alfredo de Stefano and Raymond Kopa, to win.
Both de Stefano and Kopa would go on to win the award in subsequent years. Since then,
the Ballon d’Or has been won by an incredible cast of luminaries
from Lev Yashin to Johan Cruyff to Franz Beckenbauer to Michel Platini.
There are some notable outliers on the list. Lev Yashin remains the only goalkeeper to ever win the
award and Fabio Cannavaro is the last defender to win back in 2006. If you’re looking for an
English winner, you have to go back to 2001 and Michael Owen, while Scotland was last represented
by a winner back in 1964 with Denis Law. Northern Ireland have George Best to boast about - who won
the award in 1968 - but Wales and the Republic of Ireland have no winner to their name.
One individual stands out in the list of winners: George Weah, who won the award in 1995.
Weah was the first non-European to win the Ballon d’Or. Initially,
the award had been restricted to European players, but in 1995, eligibility was expanded
to include all players from any origin that had been active at European clubs,
allowing Weah the possibility of being considered. He remains the only African winner.
Ronaldo became the first South American winner in 1997. The Ballon d’Or did become a global prize
in 2007, but winners have only ever been playing in European football at the time of their win.
There have also been different mechanisms of candidate nomination and voting over the years.
The general format has stayed the same: the award is bestowed as the result of a vote
by a jury of football journalists accredited to the national football federations within
UEFA. For example, Henry Winter is the English representative in the current set-up.
However, after 2007, the pool of eligible voters was expanded to include a jury of
specialist journalists as well as the coaches and captains of
national teams from each of the national football associations around the world.
In its present guise, France Football continue to act as the nomination board
for the final list of candidates (a list which typically includes around 30 options).
Initially, voters were asked to cast ballots for five of the candidates on the list,
indicating their preferences in the form of a ranking by allocating 5 points to their first
ranked candidate, 4 points for the second-ranked candidate, and so on. The candidate with the
most points was elected the winner. Since 2010, though, electors have been able to cast only three
ballots: ranking their top three candidates who, in turn, received 5, 3, and 1 votes, respectively.
Beyond these format changes, the competition also went through something of an upheaval in
the 2000s. In the years between 2010 and 2015, the Ballon d’Or was merged with another award,
the FIFA World Player of the Year award, to create the FIFA Ballon d'Or,
a prize which was awarded to the world's best male player. However, after the 2015 iteration,
FIFA and France Football decided not to continue the merging agreement.
Perhaps the most important development in the competition’s history was the expansion
of the award into the women’s game. In 2018, Ada Hegerberg won the inaugural edition of
the Ballon d’Or Feminin, a competition which is run in conjunction with the Ballon d’Or.
That same year, the Kopa award was introduced to recognise the best performing player under 21
years of age and the following year, the Yashin award was brought in to celebrate goalkeepers.
So, in the 65 years that have elapsed since Gabriel Hanot and
the journalists of France Football decided to institute an individual football award,
the Ballon d’Or has gone through a number of tweaks and changes and, in that time, the
scope of what is deemed worthy of celebrating has changed drastically and largely for the better.
In addition to which, its gravitas has only grown, with the Ballon d’Or
becoming – to some – a transcendent award beyond the game’s team trophies.