Story of the Ballon d’Or – The Man Who Invented Football’s Greatest Prize

Hello, my friend. I’m so glad you are here with me today. Every year, the football world seems to stop for one moment. The lights dim, the room falls silent. Hundreds of the greatest footballers and legends sit together waiting for one name. Then it happens. A spotlight finds one person. A small golden ball is placed into two waiting hands.

You know those hands. Lionel Messi has held that ball eight times. Cristiano Ronaldo, five. Together, they turned this small golden trophy into the most debated prize in football. But tonight, before another name is called, before another winner steps into the light, have you ever wondered where this golden ball came from? Come with me, my friend.

 Let me take you on a journey through the history of the Ballon d’Or, the greatest individual prize in football, and discover why so many players spend their whole lives dreaming of winning it. This is the story of the Ballon d’Or. >> [cheering] >> Every great trophy begins with an idea, and behind every great idea, there is a person.

The story of the Ballon d’Or begins with Gabriel Hanot. He was born in Arras, France in 1889. At that time, football was still a young game. There were no global broadcasts, no packed stadiums under bright lights. It was played on rough fields by people who loved the game long before the rest of the world discovered it.

Hanot grew up with that game, but he did not begin as a journalist. He began as a footballer. Good enough to represent France, he learned the game on the pitch long before he ever wrote about it. He understood football with his feet before he tried to explain it with words. But life did not allow him to stay only in football.

The First World War came. Like millions of young men across Europe, Hanot was pulled away from football by the First World War. He became a military pilot. Suddenly, the football pitch was replaced by the sky. And every flight carried the possibility of never coming home. When the war ended, he returned to football.

 But fate had one more surprise waiting for him. An injury brought his playing career to an early end. For many men, that would have been the end of the story. For Gabriel Hanot, it became the beginning of another one. If he could no longer shape football with his boots, he would shape it with his mind. He became a journalist.

 Year after year, the former player became one of football’s most respected voices. He watched football through the eyes of someone who had lived it. He knew what players felt. He knew what matches meant. And he believed football deserved something more than opinions. It needed standards. It needed comparison. Above all, it needed an answer to one simple question.

Who is truly the best? That question stayed with him for years. One day, it would change football forever. Its answer would become the most famous individual prize in the game. The Ballon d’Or. But the Ballon d’Or was never his first dream. Long before he created it, Gabriel Hanot had already spent years trying to make football better.

one idea at a time. At the newspaper L’Equipe, he did not just write about the game. He worked to change it. Wherever he saw a closed door, he tried to open it. In 1930, he created a small competition for young players. It was designed to discover boys nobody had heard of yet. Years later, one of them was a young French footballer named Raymond Kopa.

He would grow up to become a Ballon d’Or winner himself. He believed football deserved to be treated as a real profession. Players should be paid. Clubs should be run properly. The game deserved to be taken seriously. In the 1920s, when almost nobody was ready to think about it, he stood up for women’s football, too.

He never did these things for fame. He did them because he believed football should belong to everyone. Not only to the gifted. Not only to the powerful. But to anyone who loved the game. Looking [clears throat] back, that is what Gabriel Hanot spent his whole life doing. Quietly opening doors so that other people could walk through them.

Then, in 1949, came a moment that revealed exactly who Gabriel Hanot really was. By that time, Hanot had become the coach of the France national team. He had done that job for 4 years. Then France lost badly to Spain. Five goals to one. A few days later, a column appeared in a French newspaper. No name at the top.

 No signature at the bottom. The column said the coach of the national team should be fired. Right away. But the article was about more than one coach. Hanot believed French football itself had to change. The league should have fewer teams. Players needed proper fitness training. Stadiums should be opened to children so they could play freely and new talent could be discovered.

The day after the column appeared, Gabriel Hanno quietly resigned. Nobody needed to ask who had written it. Think about that for a moment. Here was a man who wrote with no name beneath the article that he himself should be fired. And then, he quietly walked away. No drama, no argument, just gone.

 Even in that moment, he was still thinking about football, still trying to make it better, still planting seeds for a future that belonged to other people. Five years passed. It was December 1954. Gabriel Hanno was now 65 years old. He was still doing what he loved most, watching football, asking questions, writing. Then, one winter morning, an English newspaper landed on his desk.

The night before, Wolverhampton Wanderers had defeated one of Europe’s strongest clubs in a friendly match under the floodlights. The next morning, an English newspaper proudly declared them champions of the world. Hanno read it once. He read it again. A few moments later, he began to type. Before we call Wolverhampton the best, let them go to Moscow.

Let them go to Budapest. Real football, he believed, was never decided by headlines. It had to be earned. It had to be proved. If clubs wanted to call themselves the best, they needed to prove it, not in one friendly match, but across an entire season against the champions of every other country in Europe home and away.

Only then could someone truly say “We are the best.” Together with his colleague, Jacques Ferran, he turned that idea into a real plan. In 1955, the idea became reality. The European Champion Clubs Cup was born. Today, the world knows it as the UEFA Champions League. For the first time, the best clubs in Europe could finally play against each other.

But if clubs could be compared, why couldn’t players? Once that competition existed, something changed. Clubs from Madrid, Milan, and Glasgow were meeting each other year after year. And naturally, people began to ask the same question Gabriel Hanot had been asking for years. Who is truly the best? Not just the best club, the best player.

Hanot and Jacques Ferran believed that question deserved a real answer. In 1956, through France Football, they created a new award. Each year, journalists from across Europe would cast their votes. Together, they would choose the best footballer on the continent. They called it the Ballon d’Or. In French, it simply means the Golden Ball. It was a simple name.

 A dream that one day would belong to millions of children around the world. One trophy for the best club. One trophy for the best player. Both born from the same idea. Both created by the same two men. Just two years apart. Gabriel Hanot helped create both of them. Yet his name appears on neither trophy. But an idea is invisible.

Sooner or later, every great idea needs a shape. For the Ballon d’Or, that shape became a small golden ball. In Paris, a family jewelry house called Mellerio Mellerio has been crafting precious objects for more than four centuries. It would become the home of football’s greatest trophy. Every year, skilled craftsmen begin the same careful process.

Slowly, the golden ball comes to life. Only two are made. One for the men’s award, one for the women’s. Each trophy takes nearly 100 hours to complete. Many hands help create it. Goldsmiths, engravers, polishers, each adding one small piece until the trophy is complete. It stands just over 30 cm tall, small enough to fit inside two hands, and heavy enough to remind every winner that dreams always carry weight.

 It is more than a trophy. It is an idea cast in metal, covered in gold, and carried by dreams. What comes next is not a list of winners. It is five unforgettable moments. Five times when this small golden ball found the right pair of hands. The first time this trophy was ever given away, it was not in Paris, not under bright lights, not in front of billions of people.

It was in a small town hall on the English coast. Blackpool Town Hall, the 18th of December, 1956. Gabriel Hanot himself placed the first golden ball into the hands of the winner. The winner was not a young rising star. He was 41 years old. His name was Stanley Matthews. Three years before that quiet ceremony in Blackpool, Matthews had given English football a match it still talks about today.

The 2nd of May, 1953. The FA Cup final. Wembley Stadium. Matthews’ team, Blackpool, was losing to Bolton three goals to one. There were 22 minutes left. In the stands, some of the crowd had already started leaving. Matthews was 38 years old. Then he began to play the match of his life. He slowed the game down.

 He drew the defenders towards him. He waited. Something changed on the pitch. He shifted his weight at the last possible second. He was gone. He crossed the ball for goals. He carried his teammates back into the match with him. Blackpool won four goals to three. To this day, English football does not call it the FA Cup final of 1953.

They call it the Matthews final. Three years later, when the journalists of Europe voted for the very first Golden Ball, they still remembered that afternoon at Wembley. The very first winner told you everything about what this trophy would be. Not always the youngest. Not always the loudest. Sometimes, the one who refused to let a game slip away.

Then the impossible happened. The small golden ball traveled somewhere it has never traveled again. The 23rd of October, 1963. Wembley Stadium. A special match to celebrate the 100th birthday of the English Football Association. England against the rest of the world. The finest players Europe and South America could put on one pitch.

A goalkeeper flew in from Moscow. His name was Lev Yashin. He wore black from head to toe. Cap, shirt, shorts, boots, all black. He kept goal for the rest of the world in the first half. 45 minutes. In those 45 minutes, he saved everything. Diving to his left, diving to his right, reaching for balls with his long arms in a way English journalists had never seen before.

After that night, the whole world started calling him by a new name. The Black Spider. Standing in the middle of the goal, dressed in black, his long arms seeming to reach every corner at once. He looked like a spider with eight arms. At the end of that year, the journalists of Europe voted. For the first time in the history of the Golden Ball, the trophy was placed into the hands of a goalkeeper.

 From that day to this, it has never happened again. 70 years have passed. No goalkeeper has ever won it. Decades later, the dream crossed another border. The 23rd of November, 1994. The Olympia Stadion, Munich. Bayern Munich against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League. A boy from a poor neighborhood called Clara Town in Monrovia, Liberia was sitting on the substitutes bench.

He had once worked as a telephone switchboard operator to help feed his family. His name was George Weah. Not long before this match, the great German player Lothar Matthäus had said out loud in front of everyone, “Weah is not one of the best.” In the second half, Weah came on. In the 80th minute, he received the ball in the middle of Bayern’s half.

He went past Matthäus. He went past Scholl. He went past Helmer. Then, he beat the goalkeeper, Oliver Kahn, from the edge of the penalty area. One goal, five German international players beaten. Between them, they had played more than 400 matches for their country. One year later, in December 1995, George Weah stood in Paris and was given the golden ball.

He was the first African player in history to hold it. More than 30 years later, he is still the only one. There is something about that fact I keep coming back to. A whole continent, 30 years, one man. A new century brought a different kind of superstar. The 30th of January, 2008, Old Trafford, a cold English night.

A free kick, 25 m from goal, against Portsmouth. Cristiano Ronaldo stood over the ball. 23 years old. That season, he had already made English defenders wonder if he was human. Step overs at speeds no wing had ever seen. Headers that came down like they had been dropped from a plane. Free kicks that behaved like they were arguing with physics.

He took a few short steps. The ball left his boot like a rocket. It rose over the wall of defenders. Then, in the last moment, it dipped impossibly under the crossbar into the top corner. The goalkeeper, David James, barely moved. There was nothing [clears throat] he could do. That season, Ronaldo scored 42 goals.

He led Manchester United to the Premier League title and the Champions League together. At the end of 2008, the small gold ball was placed into his hands. He was the first Manchester United player to hold it since George Best. 40 years had passed between them. Somewhere, an old idea from a French journalist had grown into the prize a boy from Madeira had dreamed about since childhood.

And then came the night the whole world remembers. The 18th of December, 2022. The World Cup final. Argentina against France. In Qatar. Lionel Messi had spent his whole career chasing this one trophy. Argentina had not won the World Cup since Diego Maradona in 1986. 36 years of waiting. Messi scored twice in that final.

 He scored again in the penalty shootout. Every time he touched the ball, a whole country stopped breathing. Argentina won. For a few seconds after the final whistle, the small boy who had left home at 13 to chase this dream stood still on the pitch. He wore a black Qatari robe over his blue and white Argentina shirt.

He kissed the trophy. He held it above his head. One year later, in Paris, he was given his eighth Golden Ball. More than anyone in the history of football. That small golden ball had traveled a long way from a town hall in Blackpool. 67 years. Countless pairs of hands. and still every year it went looking for the ones who refused to let a game slip away.

Every year, that small trophy travels from one pair of hands to another. Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and countless others. Before every one of them one man sitting quietly at a desk in Paris a typewriter an idea a quiet belief that football deserved something beautiful. Millions know the trophy. Almost nobody knows the man who imagined it.

Every year, that small trophy travels from one pair of hands to another. Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and countless others. Before every one of them one man sitting [clears throat] quietly at a desk in Paris a typewriter an idea a quiet belief that football deserved something beautiful. Millions know the trophy. Almost nobody knows the man who imagined it.

Gabriel Hanot died on the 10th of August, 1968. He was 78 years old. In Arras, there is no statue of him. No street carries his name. No stadium. No plaque on any wall. It is the city where he was born. Where he first fell in love with football. Where one quiet idea first began. The most watched club competition on the planet.

His idea. The most wanted individual prize in football. His idea. Every year they fill stadiums. They fill television screens. They fill children’s dreams. Yet neither of them carries his name. And perhaps he never needed them to. My friend, the small golden ball is beautiful. It fits inside two hands. Every year, the whole world looks at whoever is holding it.

But there is always someone the world does not see. Someone standing outside the light. The one who first imagined it, who quietly pushed it forward, then stepped aside when the work was done. Not because they were shy, because they had already given everything they wanted to give. Maybe you know someone like that.

Maybe, sometimes, you are someone like that. The person who does the quiet work, who opens doors for other people, then quietly steps aside while they walk through them. That work still matters, even when no one calls your name, even when your city has no statue to show for it. Perhaps that is the quietest kind of greatness.

The world is full of beautiful things built by people nobody remembers. That does not make them any less beautiful. Every year, somewhere in Paris, a spotlight finds one player standing alone on a stage. A small golden ball is placed into two hands. The theater is full. Billions of people are watching. Far away in Noah’s, the streets are quiet.

No statue. No street bearing his name. No monument telling his story. And yet, the light is still on because Gabriel Hanot turned it on. And every year, it still shines. Thank you for walking this journey with me today. I am so glad you were here. Before you go, I want to ask you something. If you could give Gabriel Anno one thing back, a statue, a street, a stadium, anything at all, what would you choose? Perhaps your answer says something about the way you see greatness. Tell me in the comments.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Until next time, my friend. Take good care of yourself. I’ll see you soon with another story.