The Ballon d'Or or how to expose 'sociological madridismo'

Florentino Pérez, a powerful man.

How on Earth did Vinicius José Paixão de Oliveira Júnior not win this year’s Ballon d’Or? That’s a question many football aficionados — mainly Madrid fans and Brazilians — are asking themselves.

Even I, as a confessed Barça fan, don’t really understand how we arrived at this situation. It’s not that I thought Vinicius Jr. deserved it over the other candidates — I actually favoured Jude Bellingham — but because we’d been told, or more accurately, guaranteed, by the press, by social media, and by the player himself, that he was the winner. So, what happened?