My oldest football memory is of being caned for scoring a goal. I was newly out of primary school, neither quick nor any good at dribbling. One time, I had no idea what happened but I twisted past two defenders, maybe three, dummied the goalkeeper flat onto his ass, and placed the ball into the left top corner. It is, to this day, the best goal I have scored; and I’ve scored a few. My reward at the end of the day was a cane to the hand for being “selfish” and not seeing three potential passes. “Football is a team game, beta.”
Harshwardhan Sir wasn’t a very good coach, but he did advocate a game of more passes than dribbles. His insistence on two-touch movement was near regimental. The ball travels faster than you, he’d tell us. Anyone holding the ball too long had to sit out for a while, or, like I found out, meet his ire. I hope he’s still watching football because I’d like him to feel miserable for his conduct. No, not the cane, but for teaching us the wrong lesson.
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On the evening of October 26th, a stream of luxury cars will clog up London’s Oxford Street. One by one, they’ll turn left into Argyll St. and stop in front of The London Palladium. From the cars will step out footballers in dazzling tuxedos and dresses, and they’ll walk slowly through a red carpet, stopping briefly for interviews and pictures. Internet influencers will follow the trail, and click a short selfie video from the red carpet to tell “chat” they’re here. Zinedine Zidane and Zlatan Ibrahimovic will be sat in the front rows. Then the doors will shut and a presenter will fashion-walk on stage to commence the 2026 Ballon d’Or ceremony.
The Ballon d’Or is awarded to the best footballer in the world over a twelve-month period, roughly overlapping the European football season. The electorate for the Men’s award is a hundred journalists, one each from the highest-ranked football countries. Voters are given three criteria: first, the player’s individual performances; then what his team accomplished; finally, his class and fair play. We’ll come back to this sequence in a bit.
The award was conceived in 1956, at a time when the French magazines L’Équipe and France Football were trying to dress European football in some pizzazz. Until 1995, only European players playing for European clubs were eligible, which means Pele and Maradona were never considered. Thankfully, the rules changed, and those two were given belated, honorary Ballon d’Ors.
Anyone can win it now. These days, the Ballon d’Or is considered the ultimate individual honour, like a medal on an army jacket. Players who have one are treated as categorically superior to others, permanently, in every argument. Commentators and columnists invoke it every time someone stitches a half-decent season for a top team. And the night is now a jacket and tie event, packaged as football’s answer to The Oscars and the Met Gala in one swoop.
I have two problems with the whole thing. Let’s tackle the smaller one first, the award itself.
So, about that sequence: individual performance, then team achievement, then class and fair play. Cristiano Ronaldo has won five Ballon d’Ors despite being a Grade-A prick to everyone, including and especially his own teammates, for all of his career. There’s also a serious argument (trigger warning) that he shouldn’t be playing competitive football at all. That’s the third category gone. That leaves the first two, and honestly, they are read in order of vibes, like how you’d read the nutritional information on a protein bar.
Lionel Messi won the 2010 Ballon d’Or despite a goalless World Cup, his team getting smacked 4-0 by Germany in the quarter-finals, and Wesley Sneijder winning a treble with Inter Milan and taking Netherlands to the World Cup final. Ronaldo won in 2013 on team achievement—none of his teams achieved anything. Xavi never won it at all, and it took Modric until 2018, when he dragged Croatia to the World Cup final, to finally get his due. You get the drift. The award isn’t rigged, at least I don’t think so. The logic is flawed because you’re asking human beings to forego bias and emotion, and vote, instead, for the coldness of sustained excellence. You’re not awarding the best, as much as the most popular. Which would be fine if you had the, erm, courage to own it up.
I pity the voters this year. For consistency of performance, you can hardly look past the 73 goals scored by Harry Kane. His Bayern Munich won the league title—they always do—but they lost a frantic Champions League semi-final to eventual winners Paris Saint-Germain; and his England surrendered a World Cup semi-final to Argentina. Lamine Yamal, still a teenager, makes you gasp every few minutes. It’s worth staying up through midnight just to watch him at full pelt. He finished the summer with gold medals from the league and World Cup, but his goal-count pales next to Kane’s. Lastly, Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappe have the goals and the dazzle but no silverware. And, before you ask, no, beauty alone doesn’t stand a chance. We’re not in the 1970s.
So, where do we go? I’d give it to Kane, or perhaps Mbappe, but it would take me hours of shuffling to decide.
Now, the main issue which keeps me up at night: the Ballon d’Or ceremony is a nothing event. Right now, it’s an amateur fan-art of The Oscars. It tries, with its tuxedos and velvet seats and wood-panelled theatres, to create an operatic atmosphere. Musicians are flown in to supply emotional depth. One year of football is condensed into cut-scene montages, and laid over soaring violins. Hundreds of current and ex-footballers, many of them legends, are gathered under one roof. And then, all we get is a queue of ghostwritten speeches, some hollow speeches by the chiefs, five awards for either gender, and…that’s it.
See, it’s futile arguing about whether it’s right for a team sport to have an entire evening dedicated to cherrypicking individuals. That conversation won’t end in a week. Movies have exactly the same problem. When was the last time a Mission Impossible trailer—or any trailer—flashed the name of its screenwriters? Doesn’t happen, won’t happen, so let’s move forward. Football too, despite being an inarguably collaborative exercise, has always loved the zoom in. For example, the Argentina 1986 team might as well be Coldplay because, barring the nerds, no one knows who played centre-midfield or left-back.
So, now that we’re here, why not have an evening worthy of football in both forms—as produced content and as a sport? Here’s an alternative award list for a Ballon d’Or evening.
We start with football’s suburban universe.
Best Crowd: Awarded to the club with the best stadium atmosphere. Incentivise percussion, megaphones, flares, and smoke. Some Turkish or South American club will win this, as they should.
Picture credit: These Football Times Best Chant: The best single chant in all of football. Lawyers might need to be involved to pick up one that’s neither limp nor a contender for hate speech.
Best Meme: Self-explanatory. Employ the lawyers overtime.
Best Interview: Reward good journalists for getting players to reveal a part of their lives. Ban journalists who ask professional football players about social media trends.
Best Video Essay, Best Written Essay, Best Book: Broadcasters and media are undergoing an epidemic where they have confused poor distribution with low attention spans. This is a way to highlight the best longform stories from the past year. The jury should have to be actual writers, not ex-footballers.
Best Pundit: Because of how much screen time they get, it’s worth rewarding the really good ones. Football doesn’t have a lot of them. And no, it cannot default to Neville or Carragher, or Henry with his exaggerated weight on every opinion, and Ian Wright with his overwrought emotion. Pick someone who brings the fans closer to the game while speaking to them like a fan themselves.
Best Podcast: No, fuck that. In fact, if FIFA/UEFA can convince the United Nations to levy higher taxes on podcasting equipment across the world, I’d be eternally grateful.
Best Stadium: Most modern football stadiums are homogenous. Think of how the imposing concrete rings of Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu have been renovated to a circular fibreglass exterior that looks similar to Munich’s Allianz Arena or London’s Tottenham Hotspurs Stadium. For this prize, reward the stadiums with an identity. Important, too, to impress that the design aspirations should tilt too far the other way.
Best DJ: A good DJ can lift a game’s atmosphere. Create an award for it and you have, overnight, a competitive market. And, before you know it, a lunatic from Southampton will play Conquest of Paradise as the teams walk out, and it will be so stupid and enormous that the club will become a cult favourite, and the sport will end up permanently better.
Best Kit Design: Incentivise Nike and Adidas to go beyond the anodyne stripes and come up with custom motifs, similar to what they produced for the World Cup this year.
Half-time. Every year, pick one special musical act, like the headline event at the Superbowl, but keep it classy. Hans Zimmer, John Powell, Yanni, Adele—that kind. Maybe you can also have an ex-footballer who’s friendly with the microphone. Like Eric Cantona.
And then we move into the real stuff.
Best Coaching Performance: The best tactical performance of the year. One game where one team so thoroughly outsmarted their worthy opponents, that a dissection is the rightful next step. Think: Spain vs France at the recent World Cup. Ask the head coach to line up a presentation and explain how they thought through their tactical choices. Make everyone wiser.
Best Team: The most consistently exceptional team. A team that built upon and idea and executed it, week after week, to a great degree of versatility. Context should matter here. Paris Saint-Germain, while footing 10x the wage bill as their nearest French rivals, shouldn’t get to walk into the nominations. The prize should cast a net wider than the big clubs with the big trophies; Bournemouth making it to the European spots should count.
Best Debut Season: This partly exists, with the Kopa Trophy. But change the rules to include only those we’re watching for the first time. They’d have to have played a minimum of 15 matches and/or 1000 minutes this season, so we know there’s a body of work.
Best Player (in each position): Self-explanatory. Best goalkeeper, best fullback, best centre-back, best midfielder defensive, best midfielder attacking, best winger, best forward. The best defensive midfielder, say Rodri, plays a fundamentally different sport from the best winger, say Vinicius, and they shouldn’t be passed through the same prism. By rewarding excellence from each position, you bring nuance to these prizes.
Best Goal: Simple, already exists. Reward difficulty of execution, not flair alone.
Best Substitute Performance: A substitution entrant who completely changed an important match. Happy to call it The Ole Gunnar Solskjaer Prize.
Best Performance (The Ballon d’Or): The current Ballon d’Or rewards a great season; I want this to reward a great performance. This is about one great evening when everything fell into place against a worthy opponent. Rodri against France, Kvaratskhelia against Bayern, Rice against Mexico. This could get very chaotic because a random midfielder from Fulham could have the greatest afternoon of his life and score a hat-trick against Manchester City that turns the title race. Which is great. I think we need a little more chaos.
Once the awards are done, we bring out more natural performers. The evening shouldn’t end with footballers mumbling prepared speeches; or worse, screaming “Siuuu” like a goat discovering cocaine. Wheel in someone who can truly leave the audience feeling they were part of something special. I’m thinking Michael Caine, David Attenborough, or Morgan Freeman.
Finish, obviously, with Eminem. On that, there can be no negotiation.
You have, now, an actual awards night. No royalty necessary, just ban streamers and influencers from all sporting events, and that’s enough.
Lovely thought process Sarthak. I love your style of writing from showing the reader your childhood, to lack of silver ware on certain players to how in trailers we don't see screen writers names. To comparing a team to Coldplay, for a non football fan I was hooked! Thank you it was a joy to read.