Please stop, Rio – your Ballon d’Or chat is utterly, utterly nauseating ...Middle East

Hands up. I’m guilty. I revolved a piece around the Ballon d’Or last year, when predicting only two players would stop Jude Bellingham from winning the award.

Ooh, it’s Bellingham versus Harry Kane versus Kylian Mbappe, I foolishly wrote before the Champions League semi-finals, fully anticipating a Euro 2024 showdown between the two favourites.

In the end, tail firmly between my legs, Rodri pipped Vinicius Junior by a narrow margin (with Bellingham in third, at least) to win the Ballon d’Or in December.

And that went down well.

The fallout from Rodri’s win was suitably unhinged. Leading the outcry were Real Madrid, who boycotted the ceremony upon hearing of the “snub” in advance and thus fed into the frenzy, playing up to a drama that is fit for the Oscars and dominates social media airspace like no other sporting accolade.

But that is exactly the hook. Put Ballon d’Or in your tweet or headline or video or podcast title and it makes for easy bait. Who cares if you are predominantly catching the attention of the blue-tick army? It engages.

When Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi were at their best, there was less debate. When one didn’t win, the other would, and that was the case from 2008 to 2017, a run only broken by Luka Modric before Messi won twice more, and again in 2023 after Karim Benzema collected the trophy.

Now, though, with Messi and Ronaldo past their peak powers, this vacated throne at the top of men’s football has only amplified the debate. Now that there are more contenders, the conversation has become more nauseating.

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Football Twitter, or should that be Football X, is now a sea of tiring takes, where Raphinha has just done this, Lamine Yamal has just done that, and Ousmane Dembele could do that, as if only the Ballon d’Or matters.

This is especially the case in the latter stages of the Champions League, when every action from a handful of players is put under the microscope, and where conversely Vinny, Mbappe, Bellingham and Mohamed Salah and have all been dismissed as second-rate for having the temerity to lose in this competition earlier than expected.

Somewhere along the way, it seems, this individual trophy has been deemed greater for the mantlepiece than the prospect of actually winning Europe’s greatest competition as part of a team, as if the prestige of being the pivotal player in your club realising that dream is not enough. And is that not everything?

The moment that changed my outlook on the Ballon d’Or conversation was after last year’s Champions League final. Perhaps it’s the cynicism that comes with age, and I certainly am not the target audience for the shouty gantry footage of co-commentators that is put out onto social media, but with each repetition of “Ballon d’Or!” from Rio Ferdinand I wanted to scream.

I didn’t, because instead I was transfixed, watching a player who won the Champions League once and represented his country 81 times reduced to two words for the best part of 10 seconds.

Honestly. Here’s a transcript:

“Ballon d’Or! Ballon d’Or! Ballon d’Or! Ballon d’Or! Ballon d’Or! Ballon d’Or! Vinicius has just taken the Ballon d’Or. Is that the Ballon d’Or in the bag now?

“Has he gone ahead now for the Ballon d’Or? Wow! He’s looked dangerous in this second half, he’s looked dangerous. Then he’s scored and backs it up. The biggest moments in the Champions League this season, Vinicius Junior stand up.”

Rio’s reaction to Vinicius Jr’s UCL Final goal #UCLfinal | @rioferdy5 pic.twitter.com/v70i9zuYYk

— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) June 2, 2024

In Ferdinand’s defence, the camera is on him, begging for a reaction, and he is simply speaking his mind.

He knows the audience will lap this up, and he has cleverly played up to this viral video – which has clocked more than 10m views across Ferdinand’s and TNT Sports’ football accounts on X, as well as 218.4k likes on TikTok – in recent weeks, when pondering Yamal’s prospects.

That video has almost 10k likes and 775k views, so why wouldn’t he play into this obsession? It’s smart, he gets it, but that doesn’t stop it from being tiresome.

The desperately sad aspect of that initial video though was that the Ballon d’Or ever came into Ferdinand’s mind in the first place. There he is, inside Wembley, watching Real Madrid counter in the 83rd minute of the Champions League, with Vinicius Jr about to seal the victory at Borussia Dortmund’s expense.

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He isn’t thinking about a 15th Champions League for Real. He isn’t even thinking about the fact Vinny has just scored in his second final. Or simply that this player has scored a goal in a final full stop. Instead, he is thinking about an individual trophy that will be handed out six months down the line.

Ferdinand is far from alone in this (I’m guilty, too, remember), but while it is possible to mute the words Ballon d’Or on X, it isn’t possible to mute the words on television without listening to no commentary whatsoever. For some, that is the only way, but when it comes to analysis during and around a match, when admittedly there is plenty of time to fill, the Ballon d’Or has become a lazy go-to.

To ask what next immediately after something huge has happened, to move the story on, is a recurring theme across all forms of media covering football, and we are all responsible for sometimes diminishing a truly remarkable feat that has just happened.

It is the nature of an ever-moving landscape, but in this case, it would help to press pause. Instead on fast-forwarding to December, let’s just try and enjoy the latter stages play out, and ask what not Barcelona’s defeat to Inter means for Raphinha’s and Yamal’s chances, nor whether Dembele is the frontrunner if Paris Saint-Germain make the final, and instead focus on the team aspect of a competition that has just delivered a tie for the ages.

Inter-Barcelona, after all, was a gift, and the real prize is the Champions League, a team trophy that should mean far more than the individual one handed out by a French football magazine.

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