FFT'S MISSION: INFILTRATE THE BALLON D'OR

After Japan, we travelled to Paris to peek behind the curtain of football's biggest awards ceremony. On a night when a PSG player wins, it gets rather lively...

- Words Dani Gil

Being a sports writer has its privileges.

It allows, among other things, the chance to live out some of football's biggest nights from the inside, infiltrated, sometimes like a spy - the Champions League final, the World Cup final or, once every year, the Ballon d'Or.

Unlike Marcelo Bielsa's Leeds, we could leave the binoculars and pliers at home. After securing our accreditation for this year's gala evening, FourFourTwo was off to central Paris and the 2,500-seat Theatre du Chatelet, just a couple of hundred metres from both Notre-Dame Cathedral and the Louvre.

On the banks of the River Seine, we found it completely overrun in the hours before the ceremony. The Ballon d'Or has had its roots in Paris since France Football handed out the award for the first time in 1956 - Paris Saint-Germain didn't even exist back then, and since their formation in 1970, a player from the club has won the award only once.

When it happened in 2021, in reality Lionel Messi's victory owed not to his performances at the Parc des Princes. He'd only moved to France three months before the ceremony - the honour was instead influenced by his Copa America triumph that summer, his long-awaited first international trophy with Argentina. George Weah had spent much of 1995 with Les Parisiens, starring for PSG in the Champions League, but had joined Milan by the time the Ballon d'Or was his.