Kate Scott will help announce the winner at this year’s Ballon d’Or ceremony on Monday at The London Palladium, bringing football’s biggest individual award to the UK for the first time in its 70 year history.
That shift matters because readers are not just asking when the Ballon d’Or ceremony is happening, but where it is happening and who will be on stage when the winner is revealed. Scott said this will be the fourth time she has hosted the event, and that her previous three ceremonies were all elsewhere on the European continent.
She said the move feels closer to home, especially because the room will include the world’s best players, men and women. She also pointed to the atmosphere that comes with doing the ceremony in London, where football sits at the centre of the culture and where the winner will be announced in front of a crowd that knows the game well.
There is also a more pointed note in the build-up. Scott said Harry Kane could draw a similar reaction to the one she saw last year in Paris when Ousmane Dembélé won, but she added that it has been 25 years since the last British player lifted the prize. Michael Owen is still the last British winner, and that gap gives Monday’s ceremony a local edge that goes beyond the red carpet and the stage lights.
The larger question now is not the date or the venue. It is whether this year’s ceremony will finally produce a British winner, or whether London will instead be the latest stop in a long global race for football’s most prestigious individual award.
