Ballon d'Or Heads to London for First Time Since 2019 as Dembele and Bonmati's Reigns End

A ceremony on the move

The Ballon d'Or will be handed out in London on October 26, breaking a run of ceremonies held at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris that stretches back to 2019. Organizers are staging the 70th edition of the award at the London Palladium, a switch tied partly to honoring Stanley Matthews, the English winger who became the award's first-ever winner back in 1956.

It marks a rare trip outside France for an award that has become shorthand for the best individual season in men's and women's football, and gives England's football establishment a rare turn hosting one of the sport's biggest nights outside a major tournament final.

Who is defending what

Ousmane Dembele arrives as the defending men's champion after a 2025 win built on his season with Paris Saint-Germain, while Aitana Bonmati is chasing a response from the field after claiming the women's prize last year. Both will hand over their trophies in London regardless of whether they feature among this year's finalists.

The voting panels remain split by gender and by scale: a jury of 100 journalists, one from each of the top 100 nations in the FIFA world rankings, decides the men's award, while 50 journalists from the top 50 ranked nations in the women's game vote on that prize. Nominee lists were published in the weeks before the ceremony, with clubs and national federations making their usual public cases for their players in the run-up.

Why the venue matters

For a prize that has occasionally been accused of running on tradition as much as transparency, the move to London is being read by several outlets as an attempt to widen the award's footprint beyond its French roots, decades after it was created by France Football magazine. Whether the change of scenery changes anything about who actually wins remains to be seen on the night, when the London Palladium's stage takes on a very different kind of star power than it is used to.