Ballon d'Or Ceremony

The Ballon d'Or Ceremony calendar tracks the date, host city, and local start time of football's most famous individual prize-giving evening, organised by France Football, the French sports magazine, in collaboration with UEFA. The gala — one of global sports' most-watched ceremonies — awards the Ballon d'Or to the best male footballer, the Ballon d'Or Féminin to the best female player, plus the Kopa Trophy (under-21), the Yashin Trophy (goalkeeper) and, intermittently, the Gerd Müller Trophy for the calendar year's top scorer. France Football, a weekly founded in 1946 and part of the Groupe Amaury media group, has run the Ballon d'Or since 1956. UEFA became co-organiser in 2024, merging the prize with the now-defunct UEFA Best Player in Europe award. The voting panel for the men's award consists of 100 journalists from the top FIFA-ranked nations, while 50 journalists decide the women's prize — a structure that gives the honour a broad, merit-based foundation. The trophy itself, a golden football mounted on a pyrite base, is one of the most recognisable symbols in world sport, and the ceremony's live broadcast on L'Équipe's television channel and streaming services draws a vast global audience each autumn. The calendar contains a single annual event: the evening of the ceremony. Each entry lists the date, the precise start time (typically 21:00 Central European Time) and the host city. Historically the gala took place at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, but recent editions have moved to other European cities. The award date usually falls in late October or early November, roughly three months after the Champions League final, serving as a definitive capstone to the European club season before the winter international break. Unlike match-focused feeds that plot dozens of fixtures, this sports calendar is minimalist — one entry per year — yet that entry marks the night when months of on-field performance crystallise into a single name. Because the Ballon d'Or takes into account performances from the previous August to July, the ceremony's timing creates a clear annual rhythm for those who chronicle the sport. Football journalists, broadcast producers, sponsorship managers and devoted supporters who follow the award's buildup can use this smart calendar feed — free to subscribe — to add the ceremony directly to Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook. By anchoring the exact local time and venue in a day-to-day planner, it removes the need to search for press releases or social-media posts each time the date is announced. The feed updates regularly, so if the date, location or start time changes — a rare but disruptive event that occurred in 2020 when the pandemic forced cancellation and in 2021 when the gala was relocated from the traditional Paris theatre — the corrected information appears automatically, preserving accuracy without manual intervention.