I am very pleased to have explained in my article yesterday the ins and outs of the Ballon d'Or voting, which allows us to rule out any possibility of a fix. Whoever wants it can recover it to know the matter. It is not, in any case, a table where Ceferin and two others meet to harass Madrid. It is not even, as the club note says, 'the UEFA Ballon d'Or'. UEFA has appeared this year to support the gala, but the award is given by France Football, the jury is chosen by the magazine, we receive the communications from them and we send our selection to them.
For days, in an exercise of risky optimism, the certainty has spread throughout Spain that the Ballon d'Or would be won by Vinicius, based on his good season. I wouldn't have been surprised, so much so that I voted for him first, giving him 15 points. But he knew that two handicaps could weigh him down, his poor Copa América, and those poorly controlled reactions on the field.
Well, the buzz of the afternoon is that he hasn't won it. It seems that Rodri, a colossal midfielder, without his magic, but a player of enormous performance and stability, has won it.
And Florentino's reaction to the news, known early in the afternoon, seemed disproportionate to me. Madrid is the creator of the European Cup, of which the Ballon d'Or is an early appendix, it had a lot to do with the magnificent development of this competition in its beginnings, and in these years it once again proudly reigns over it, without being an impediment to its attempt to replace it with a fantastic Super League outside of UEFA. Which, as you can see, has not taken any retaliation for it.
That Madrid, the “when they lose they shake hands” club, kicks the table for so little, has two explanations: Florentino's growing arrogance and the accumulation of bad news these days.
And I'm not referring to the 0-4, after all, a football incident. The failure of the Super League has been dragging on for a long time and now it finds itself with a serious failure in its economic project, based on a violation of immunity. The neighbors have stopped his concerts, which will significantly reduce the expected income (he already collected 360 million on account of the new possibilities of the stadium) and will make the enormous expense of the hypogeum, designed for this purpose, useless. Today the sole administrator of the company Real Madrid Estadio SL goes to trial, due to the complaint filed by the neighbors, people of flight and knowledge, who cannot resist living with that noise. The possibility of soundproofing the stadium seems like a pipe dream to me. I see soundproofing their houses as equally impossible, apart from being an evil proposal, to transfer the blame to them.
The Community had been giving him very questionable licenses for this activity, which is not the stadium's own. The City Council intended to give it a parking tunnel so that, among other things, VIPs could park in the stadium's basements, a requirement for the stadium to host the 2030 World Cup final.
All that is up in the air, on top of that Mbappé is not working, although that is the least of it, and in the guts of the coaching staff there is dissension and they are looking for snitches in two directions, that of the president and that of the outside.
All together perhaps it can explain this obfuscation. But in no case justify it.
