Vini Jr., Ballon d'Or drama shows it's only as important as we make it

It won’t come as a surprise to regular readers, but I really don’t care about the Ballon d’Or despite having followed it since I was a kid. Things you achieve on the field of play are just inherently more meaningful to me than baubles others give you. Still, I respect its history and the fact that, as a kid, it introduced me to one Sokol Kushta, who finished 30th in 1987.

Kushta was picked by the Albanian jury member, one of 27 voters at the time, who decided that the Flamurtari striker was fifth-best that year in a class that included Ruud Gullit, Gary Lineker, Emilio Butragueno, Marco Van Basten, John Barnes, Paulo Futre, Michel, Bryan Robson, Lothar Matthaus and others. (Non-Europeans weren’t eligible at the time.) Maybe this goal swung it.

Yet, as my “Gab & Juls” co-host Julien Laurens points out, what matters is that “the players care about it.” Because they do. A ton, in fact. So much so that when Real Madrid got wind that Vinícius Junior. wouldn’t be winning it, they decided to boycott the whole ceremony. Not just Vini, but all eight of their players who had been nominated, with ESPN quoting a source who called it “a historic robbery.”

Within hours, a host of Vini’s Brazil and Real Madrid teammates weighed in, with Eduardo Camavinga calling it “football politics’ and Richarlison calling it a defeat for football. In Brazil, some saw it as retaliation for Vinícius‘ stance against racism.

Maybe they genuinely care so much about what 100 journalists from 100 different FIFA nations think. Maybe they think it was some sort of anti-Real Madrid conspiracy involving UEFA since they are now partners of France Football, the magazine that gives out the award, and it’s payback for Madrid president Florentino Perez and his efforts to create a European Super League. (Of course, the Ballon d’Or ultimately went to Rodri, who plays for Manchester City — not exactly a UEFA-friendly club.) Maybe they just saw their friend being genuinely upset and wanted to cheer him up.

Whatever the case, the hype around the award continues to fascinate and, if anything, Real Madrid’s snub only adds more importance to it. They had planned a whole five-hour show on Real Madrid TV around the ceremony. It was canceled, as was the club’s chartered plane to Paris. You don’t snub things that are irrelevant; you snub things that matter to you, if you feel you’ve somehow been disrespected.

Despite my feelings toward it, on Monday night I figured it was my journalistic duty to at least watch part of the Ballon d’Or ceremony. I couldn’t find it on my TV so I looked for a livestream, and the first one that popped up was from YouTuber IShowSpeed. Now, despite my venerable age, I actually know who he is, not least because he has done a ton of stuff in and around football and he’s extremely popular, with 32.8 million subscribers to his YouTube channel.

I figured his stream would consist of him watching the ceremony and talking/commenting over it … and I was wrong. Most of the 3-hour, 22-minute stream was just him sitting in his seat at the awards ceremony next to Ibai Llanos (another streamer) watching events on stage. (Don’t believe me? Check it out here.) He occasionally changes facial expression, but most of the time he doesn’t actually say anything. When I tuned in, there were 285,000 people watching — nearly 10 times as many as were watching the official livestream on Manchester City’s channel.

The point here isn’t about judging those who choose to spend their time watching a guy sit and hardly talk during an awards ceremony. Tastes evolve, and folks can do what they like. It’s more that IShowSpeed would take his massive audience to something like this, which is ultimately a contrived, artificial event. Again, it has meaning because we choose to give it meaning.

For nearly two decades, the Ballon d’Or award served as a convenient narrative to keep score in the age-old rivalry between the GOAT contenders, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. This was the first year neither made the 30-man shortlist — which is put together by France Football staffers — and conventional wisdom had it that Vini would win, with Rodri an unlikely outsider given both his position (defensive midfielder) and season-ending injury suffered on Sept. 22 against Arsenal. Vincent Garcia, France Football’s editor-in-chief, told The Times UK that they did everything they could to keep the identity of the winner a secret, including not notifying them in advance as they had done in the past.

Voters cast their encrypted selections into some sort of secure online platform with multifactor authentication that, according to Garcia, only he can access by typing in a secret code only known to him. Garcia also told The Times that on the day of the ceremony, he would access the servers and painstakingly write down the names of the winners and put each into the correct envelope. And he would personally hand each envelope to the announcers himself.

With the greatest of respect to Garcia — who deserves credit for building the Ballon d’Or into a mega-event even now that the Cristiano-Messi duopoly is gone — you suspect there’s a bit of showmanship and hyperbole at play here. Surely he’s not the only person who can access the tally in the ultrasecure server? I mean, what if he loses the password, like the guy in Wales who lost half a billion dollars worth of bitcoin because of a misplaced scrap of paper? Is there really no tech nerd who has backdoor access? And if there isn’t, how could Real Madrid have known, hours before the event, that Vini didn’t win?

Who knows? Who cares? It’s all part of the show, I guess. Still, it does leave you with a tinge of sadness.

These are multimillionaire superstars at the top of their game who have won some of the most important trophies in soccer. Why the need for approval from a hundred journalists from a hundred countries, the vast majority of whom they’ll never meet? (A bit like U.S. Supreme Court justices, Ballon d’Or voters are appointed by one man, France Football’s editor-in-chief, and serve until they die or retire; unlike US Supreme Court justices, they don’t have to go through congressional approval, they get to name their successors and they can be removed if France Football think they are being biased, as happened to my ESPN Argentina colleague, Quique Wolff.)

I suppose the stock answer is these athletes are born competitors, and they compete for individual awards the way they compete to win games on the pitch. The problem is, winning games on the pitch is something they can control far more than who likes them and why.