Thoughts on the Ballon d'Or
I really want to apologise for the lateness of this one. I’ve been nursing a combination of the flu and a nasty toothache that both seemed to exacerbate each other. I know the newsletter has been coming out too slowly recently, and I’m sorry about that. This particular health issue of the last few weeks seems to be nearly over, thankfully.
Stats are from FBRef unless stated otherwise.
At the start of every year, I get very invested in the Oscars.
I’ll try to watch as many of the nominated films as I can. I’ll “stay up” (ok, I’d probably be awake anyway) until the early hours of the morning watching the ceremony. Why do I do this? I don’t really know. I think the Academy voters tend to be pretty poor judges of good films. I get infuriated by the whole thing, year after year, with only some incredibly stale jokes from the TV broadcast to break up the irritation. But what gets me, what really gets under my skin, is when some people think they’re oh so clever for pointing out that the best films never win, therefore the whole awards circuit is a waste of time.
No shit. We’re not here because we think this is an accurate judge of quality. We all know that. In truth, it would be boring if the best films actually won every year. But once in a blue moon, great movies do actually win, and it’s thrilling.
That’s kind of the lens through which I view the Ballon d’Or.
A few weeks ago, Mike Goodman and Michael Caley of the Double Pivot Podcast told me they were doing “nerd based ballon d’or rankings” throughout this season and asked if I wanted to contribute to the conversation. They did a podcast on the subject recently, and I realised I was coming at it from a different place. They’re viewing the contemporary European football landscape from a lifetime of watching American sports and trying to find the players who add the most “value” to a team. Even though I’m pretty sure they have criticism of those awards, they’re trying to bring the framework of US sports’ individual prizes to the Ballon d’Or.
I did not grow up in America and have essentially no idea how any of its most popular sports work. So that’s not really how I’m ever going to think about individual awards here.
The Ballon d’Or wasn’t really the award we know today until fairly recently. Handed out by the magazine France Football, the award was only open to players with a European nationality until 1995. Yes, that would have made Lionel Messi ineligible. It still limited entry to those playing for European clubs until 2007, when it really shaped itself as a “best in the world” honour. Even then, I don’t remember people taking it seriously, especially here in England. No one in his native country cared at the time when Kevin Keegan won the award twice in the 1970s. Michael Owen didn’t particularly seem to care when he won the trophy at the time. Before the internet, at least on these shores, it was an obscurity for football nerds.
The internet probably served as a gateway to the Ballon d’Or’s popularity, only for the Messi/Cristiano Ronaldo rivalry to supercharge things. I guess what I’m saying is that we don’t need an all-important award for the best player of the season. The Oscars at least serve a purpose in that they’re supposed to encourage film studios to make “good” films instead of just crowdpleasing blockbusters. I think footballers already had plenty of incentives to play well. If anything, an individual trophy like this just distracts from the bit that actually matters: helping the team win games.
It’s clearly not what it used to be, but growing up in the UK, the most well-known individual prize across sport was the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, and that’s sort of my framework here. It’s explicitly an award with “personality” in the title, a title less about “objective value” than who did the best job of capturing the public’s imagination. This is how I’ve come to think about the Ballon d’Or. It’s about the player who most excites people, who does something that drives narrative. It’s a popularity contest that has nothing to do with helping the team win football matches and that’s just fine. It’s not about who actually plays the best football, necessarily. Winning trophies and earning money are rewards enough for that.
Ok, so the Ballon d’Or is an award for the player with the best vibes. So now, way out in November, let’s try and project who might have the best vibes at the end of the season.