Ballon d'Or: $264,000 in suspicious bets reveal massive leak

Harry Kane was crowned Ballon d’Or ahead of Kylian Mbappé, Lamine Yamal, Rodri and Lionel Messi — a ranking that anonymous bettors appeared to know several days before the ceremony. According to analysis published by finance-focused account Upside, $264,000 was injected onto the Polymarket prediction market platform via twelve suspicious accounts created in October, betraying apparently perfect knowledge of the result.

Seven of these accounts bet on no other subject than the Ballon d’Or. Six of them placed substantial sums within fifteen minutes of registration. A bettor identified under the pseudonym kraben006 first made gains on Kane’s victory, then reinvested all his stakes on the exact ranking positions. This parlay — Mbappé 2nd, Yamal 3rd, Rodri 4th, Messi 5th — reached 72% probability on Polymarket several days before the trophy was awarded.

France Football editor-in-chief Vincent Garcia himself acknowledged the vulnerability of the vote in an interview with Brut this weekend: “Once there are three, five people in the loop, the risk of a leak is not zero.” A candor that takes on particular significance in light of events.

This is not the first time the vote has been compromised before its official announcement. In 2024, the premature leak of Rodri’s triumph over Vinícius Jr triggered a diplomatic earthquake and led Real Madrid to boycott the ceremony entirely. In response, the organizers tightened their procedures, promising that the winner would only be informed at the last moment.

These precautions apparently were not enough. While the identity of the bettors remains protected by blockchain anonymity, the surgical precision of the scenario that played out on Polymarket rules out any hypothesis of mere intuition or luck. The Ballon d’Or faces a new credibility crisis, compounded by an unprecedented dimension: leaks no longer serve merely to feed the sports press, they now serve to generate direct financial profits.