How Messi vs Ronaldo turned Ballon d’Or into global spectacle

Ceremony has come long way since Owen accepted his award in stationery cupboard, writes Rory Smith

The Ballon d’Or became the battleground on which Messi and Ronaldo vied for supremacy

Rory Smith

25 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

In the quarter of a century since the men’s Ballon d’Or was last presented in England – or, for that matter, to an Englishman – things have changed somewhat. On Monday, the most prestigious individual awards in football will be handed out at a bombastic ceremony at the London Palladium, all designer tuxedos, red carpets and fusillades of flashbulbs.

In 2001, by contrast, Michael Owen took receipt of the trophy in what appeared to be the stationery cupboard at Liverpool’s former training ground, Melwood. Owen, boyish and beaming, wore an oversized grey suit. So did Gérard Ernault, then the editorial director of France Football. They stood in front of a plywood shelving unit. The whole thing looks like a deleted scene from The Office.

At the time, Owen was effusive about the honour. He was, he said, “extremely proud”. To win an award previously claimed by “Beckenbauer, Cruyff, Rivaldo, Bobby Charlton, Kevin Keegan” was, as he put it, “unbelievable”.

Over the years, he has fleshed that story out a little: as he tells it now, he was partly surprised to win it because he didn’t know what the Ballon d’Or was. When his manager, Gérard Houllier, had called to tell him he had won, he had to ask him what that meant.

“It just wasn’t that important a thing in our day,” he told The Good, The Bad and the Football podcast. Paul Scholes, the show’s co-host, agreed: in his view, the Ballon d’Or only captured the British imagination when Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi started winning it in the late 2000s.

It would be easy to attribute that exclusively to the insularity and selfobsession that English football took so long to shake off. It would also be quite accurate. Owen came to understand how much it mattered when he signed for Real Madrid in 2004. “Whenever they mention your name, it’s [as a] Ballon d’Or winner. It is so much bigger in other countries,” he said.

But it also contains a kernel of truth. The Ballon d’Or has been meaningful since it was first awarded in 1956 – to Stanley Matthews, who accepted it at a ceremony at Blackpool Town Hall; the town’s mayor commissioned a decorative china plate to commemorate the occasion – but that its scale and significance has grown exponentially over the course of this century is hard to dispute. In part, that is because of changes to the award itself: originally only available to European players, the rules were tweaked in the 1990s first to allow anyone playing for a European club to be eligible, and then to players across the world. (Messi, in 2023, became the first and only player to win the men’s award while playing outside Europe.) A women’s honour was introduced, belatedly, in 2018; the ceremony now includes prizes for coaches, goalkeepers and young players too.

Just as important, perhaps, was the sixyear period between 2010 and 2015 in which it merged with Fifa’s more official, but less historic, World Player of the Year. The (admittedly brief) involvement of the game’s governing body expanded the voting franchise, including nationalteam coaches and players, as well as journalists. It also elevated it from a slightly enigmatic honour bestowed by a French magazine into something more official.

That sheen endured even when the partnership with FIFA ended and the voting reverted to the traditional model: France Football’s editorial board now chooses the candidates and sends a shortlist of 30 players to a panel of journalists around the world, one for each of the top 100 nations in Fifa’s world rankings.

And then there was the rivalry between Messi and Ronaldo. In their imperial phases, the Ballon d’Or became the battleground on which they vied for supremacy; how seriously the two greatest players of their generation took it defined how seriously their employers, their peers, their successors and their fans took it.

Winning it now is more than just a passport to the sport’s “pantheon”, as France Football’s former editorin-chief Pascal Ferré has put it. Where once it might have been a byproduct of collective success, now it is an ambition in and of itself, a legitimate gauge of greatness.

For weeks in the build-up to the ceremony, Ferré’s successor Vincent Garcia fields calls from agents and executives trying to work out if their player has won; Max Eberl, Bayern Munich’s sporting director, noted that Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal appeared to be running “campaigns” designed to sway voters in a year in which there is no consensus candidate to win.

Eberl’s favourites, Harry Kane and Michael Olise, would not debase themselves in such a way, he intimated. That Kane was, at roughly the same time, conceding interviews to the BBC and the Athletic was obviously just a coincidence. Whether any of it has made any difference is hard to say. Security around the voting is so tight that the magazine has a private email server for the jury to submit its choices. Only Garcia and his assistant know the outcome until the award is presented: not in a stationery cupboard to a baffled recipient, but on an illuminated stage with all the world watching.