Not awarding the 2020 Ballon d’Or is a mistake. An open letter from Sports.ru to France Football

France Football have announced they’re not awarding the Ballon d’Or for 2020.

We must admit that despite all of the imperfections of individual awards, the Ballon d’Or delivers the best balance of common sense, prestige and historical importance.

So it pains us to see the steps that lead to the award’s slow death. The era of Cristiano Ronaldo vs Leo Messi, as well as the temporary merger with the FIFA Golden Ball award, have elevated the award’s popularity and media appeal. It was already the most important in the world of football but reached even greater heights thanks to the main modern football superheroes.

The Messi-Ronaldo era is coming to an end. For the Ballon d’Or, it’s both a threat and an opportunity. It’s a threat because it may recede to its former place (or even less than that). It’s an opportunity to find new competitive advantages.

Clear-cut criteria are even more important once the era of Leo and Cristiano ends. But it doesn’t seem like France Football are preparing for it: the criteria are still unclear and contradictory at times.

So with the decision to cancel this year’s award, the organizers have just shot themselves in the foot yet again. The reasoning in the statement is poor.

1. It seems like FF’s biggest reason is the anomaly of the current season that places teams and players in different conditions. That would be appropriate only if elite players were unable to play enough games to be assessed.

In fact, there are few matches lost. At the top level, only the Champions League has scrapped some of its fixtures. In the other tournaments, all teams are in a similar situation.

Absolute equality is impossible. Every year teams from different leagues are placed in different conditions as well: Germany has a winter break, England has festive period matches, different leagues have a different number of games, some have additional cup tournaments.

And that’s not even talking about the importance of the European Championship – a key competition for the award in which many of the top players simply can not participate.

Ligue 1 is a problem, of course. This is where the principle of equal opportunity is actually violated. As far as the Ballon d’Or is concerned, PSG is clearly a victim here: they have candidates to make the award’s shortlist but not to win it outright. 

The French league has produced just one winner ever (Jean-Pierre Papin in 1991, which is also the last time a Ligue 1 player got into the top-3). Thus, the Ligue 1 issue does not compromise the award enough to justify its cancellation.

2. «Two months out of the usual 11 available to form an opinion and make a choice is way too little to decide».

So the organizers don’t even hide that due to the criteria and the voting process they lose a month out of every year. Their only concern is an unusual distribution of games this year.

Sometimes, the voting loses even two months while the voters appear to be unaware that they pick winners for performances during a calendar year (otherwise Luka Modric’s win wouldn’t have happened – he deserved the award but not for a calendar year; he even accepted publicly that he was poor by his standards early in 2018-19).

In practice, Ballon d’Or has always been the award given for the previous season (with a tilt towards the latter part when the trophies are decided) and big international tournaments if there are any. It’s normal and even logical (albeit the ceremony timing is strange then) but it doesn’t match the official format of the award. Now it’s also official that there are only 11 months to draw conclusions from.

3. «Current conditions (matches behind closed doors, five substitutions and single-legged final eight in European competitions is too far from the usual scenery.»

First, matches behind closed doors or with severely limited attendance as well as five substitutions will also apply next season, should the next Ballon d’Or be cancelled too?

Second, there’s no basis to believe that five subs and matches behind closed doors significantly influence star players’ individual performances. If they were, then the attendance should always be considered as a factor that puts players in different conditions.

There are studies out there that show that the attendance affects the home team (and by extension can to an extent influence individual play). But saying that players from clubs with higher attendance have an advantage sounds downright silly, isn’t it? And that’s right! That influence is marginal, statistical noise compared to bigger factors.

But the inadequacy of FF’s biggest part of reasoning leads us down that path. What’s even more absurd is that in normal conditions it can be a factor (a really, really small one though); now everyone is playing without fans, so players are more equal than ever before.

Third, the new European competition format. That does actually damage the ability to determine the best team and gives players fewer chances to impress. That’s an acceptable proposition in theory but there’s an issue: FF is not concerned that the Euros and the World Cups are played using this format. Quite the opposite: the importance of these tournaments is highlighted during the ceremony.

4. «We do not want [the winner] to forever have an asterisk of ‘Trophy won in exceptional circumstances due to the Covid-19 health crisis’.

It’s far from a foregone conclusion that there would be an asterisk. Can it be considered more damaging than that of the winner in a World Cup year (Fabio Cannavaro, for one, has such an asterisk: he deserved it but wouldn’t have won it if not for the World Cup).

Football-wise, the coronavirus crisis has only changed one key variable, and that is Euro 2020. Other than that, the players are in an unusual but relatively fair set of circumstances. There would be no asterisk to be ashamed of.

And again, if we consider Euro 2020 re-scheduling so important (and it is the only major football consequence of the current crisis), the next Ballon d’Or should be scrapped too. The tournament wasn’t expected to be played then and now it is and after an extremely gruelling condensed season to boot.

So either two instalments should be cancelled or we need to accept a simple truth: the conditions are unprecedented but equally so for everyone.

5. «Our 220 judges (both men and women) live all around the world and some may have been distracted from their mission of observing the players due to other priorities and emergencies.»

It’s possible that it will shock you but the award has never been purely about football. It has, however, always been a solid barometer of public opinion. In this context, the ‘mission of observing’ doesn’t make too much sense.

The award is voted by football journalists and not all football journalists watch the game all day long or have an in-depth understanding of the sport’s details. That’s normal, that’s usually simply not a part of the job.

There are journalists who look at their laptops more than at the actual pitch during games because they have stories to file at the final whistle.

Media like The Guardian provide more of an independent and in-depth ranking. The process used is more precise (each voter submits a list of 40 players as opposed to five). But it’s a different genre; it’s for the geeks, so yes, it’s boring.

The Ballon d’Or is simpler and easier to understand. It makes sense but it’s not about ‘mission of observing’. It’s about the current mood. And the journalists would’ve done the job of reflecting that this year as easily as any other.

6. The last substantial argument made by FF is that they want to show solidarity during the crisis. It’s not related to football but is actually logical.

And still, it isn’t good enough. First, the award doesn’t necessarily mean there needs to be a ceremony and just like football behind closed doors is better than no football at all, this could’ve been the way to go. Second, no one knows what the world will be like in December and January.

Even if that was the main concern – why not announce the cancellation when the situation is clearer?

Фото: Gettyimages.ru/David Ramos, Philipp Schmidli, UEFA – Handout, Michael Steele, Matthias Hangst; globallookpress.com/Jie Ke°�chen/Xinhua, May James/Keystone Press Agency