AWARDS SEASON, ALLEGEDLY
The Ballon d'Or nominee list says it all
The 2026 Ballon d'Or nominee list came out this week, and one club walked away with what looks suspiciously close to half the shortlist. Funny how that keeps happening to the same two or three teams.
I'll say the quiet part first. PSG landing something like ten nominees on one list is not really a football story anymore. It is a vibes story, and the vibes are rotten.
I am not going to explain how a list like that gets put together, because I do not need to. The list explains itself, and anybody who has watched this sport for more than a season already knows who it was put together for.
Think about how the process actually works. A panel of judges, largely the same journalists who spend the rest of the year deciding which clubs get called romantic and which get called boring, sits down once a year and decides who the best players on the planet are. Somehow the club with the biggest wage bill and the loudest marketing department always ends up owning half the guest list.
That is not merit. That is momentum, and momentum is just money wearing a nice suit.
Meanwhile a club that actually runs itself properly, keeps the books honest, builds a stadium the rest of the world quietly envies, and asks its own supporters to be patient through a rebuild instead of buying a trophy off the shelf, gets nothing for it. Not a nomination, not a mention, not so much as a polite text from the panel saying well played on doing it the hard way.
Here is the part that should worry actual football people, not just us. If ten nominees from one dressing room is the new normal, the award has stopped measuring the best individual players and started measuring which club spent the most on being famous. That is not an opinion. That is just arithmetic.
Would I like a Tottenham player nominated for one of these things someday? Obviously. Do I expect the same panel that has spent years perfecting the art of not noticing us to suddenly develop taste? Also no.
- How the award should work: best players, judged on the season they actually had, full stop.
- How it actually works, and I have watched it work this way my entire life: the same handful of super clubs nominate themselves by proxy every single year, and the rest of us vote in a poll that changes absolutely nothing.
Call it a fan's opinion if you want. I am calling it the only sane reading of the evidence in front of me.