“I could have watched all night, I could have watched all night and still have begged for more! I could have spread my wings, and done a thousand things, I’ve never done before …” Well, you get the idea with that one. As the aftershocks of an absolute clásico of a Ballon d’Or ceremony continue to reverberate, it seems time to ask: can anything beat the electrifying excitement of a sporting awards event?
Certainly not sport itself, which demonstrably lacks sufficient mechanisms for victory and reward, and increasingly requires the imposition of montage, evening dress and Eurovision‑levels of tactical voting to make sense of it all. If you are unfortunate enough to be stratospherically successful and worshipped in a team sport, there is always the consolation of an individual award to address this. Are there awards yet to recognise team-like behaviour among practitioners of individual sports? If not, this must surely be addressed without delay.
For lovers of the dickie bow and the drum’n’bass-accompanied double back heel, the Ballon d’Or is a heritage event in an ever-expanding series of red carpet fixtures designed to create winners and losers out of the winning-and-losing business. There are the PFA Awards, the Laureus World Sports Awards, the Football Writers’ Awards, the ever-amplified BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards – and last year there was The Footies, a glittering new event whose co-founders included Rio Ferdinand and the Sun newspaper, and which was described (with some originality) as “football’s answer to the Oscars”. As the Sun hardly needed to point out: “An awards ceremony for the beautiful game in this country is LONG overdue.”
Back in November, a study by the Made-up Institute of Sportonomics found that the sport of sporting awards is the fastest growing in the world. At the current rate of growth in popularity, it is expected to overtake hockey in the US by 2018, and is already outperforming certain forms of cricket here at home.
Considered in tandem with the mushrooming awards industry as a whole, it can be no surprise that telly futurologists are confidently predicting the eventual debut of shows with working titles such as Awards of the Day, dedicated to highlights of all that day’s awards action.
I would also like to see something like the Sports Awards Awards launched, dedicated to recognising outstanding achievements in the sporting awards industry. This would be inspired by the Awards Awards, a genuine Noughties event which was held in some London hotel ballroom, and which celebrated excellence in the field of other events held in London hotel ballrooms.
Naturally, given that we live in a world where both Tony Blair and Paris Hilton have a clutch of humanitarian awards, sports awards must cultivate their own eccentricities in order to stand out among the throng.
Thus it is absolutely right that Roy Hodgson’s decision not to vote for either Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi for the Ballon d’Or is furiously analysed and derided by every true England supporter, as though it were a particularly off-colour joke about their wife. Nothing marks you out as unsporting so much as the belief that who the England manager voted for in the Ballon d’Or is a sublime irrelevance – akin to caring about Prince Edward’s view on relations between India and Pakistan.
Observing that you just can’t bring yourself to care about which way Hodgson voted would be like saying that Britain should give up its seat on the UN Security Council, because we haven’t been a serious world power for decades – or taking the view that we shouldn’t spend gazillions on nuclear weapons that we wouldn’t ever be allowed to use anyway unless the Americans told us to. Not to give a quarter of a toss about who Hodgson voted for may not technically be treason – yet – but it comes as near as dammit to accepting that England is in the geriatric home of international football, and doesn’t really know quite what it is doing any more.
Which is obviously absurd. We’ve still got it.
As for the Ballon d’Or voting breakdown in its entirety, it reads like a love letter to all sports which rely on human judges – which are, of course, the absolute best sports, unless you count the ones where you have to look at a clock to know how anyone competing in them is doing.
That neither Messi nor Ronaldo could bring themselves to acknowledge that the other one has been playing fairly well this year only adds to the gravitas of the poll, to which even more dementedly serious statistical scrutiny should be applied. Were that possible.
Having said all that, a certain unease makes me wonder whether the experts are wrong, and we have actually reached peak sporting award (I’m sure we’ve certainly reached peak describing-things-as-peak, so my apologies for that styling). Watching the Sports Personality of the Year last month, the video packages seemed to have become so insanely over-produced and light on actual action that it was difficult to escape the conclusion that sport is now just the raw material – the rushes, if you like – for the real virtuosos: the makers of montages.
Then again, perhaps this sort of naysaying could be headed off by simply creating further awards. Let the Montage d’Or category be added to the roster of at least one gala event, and we need say no more about it. The show – all of the shows – must go on.