How the Secret Visit to Messi for His Sixth Ballon d'Or Leaked in Real Time

In 2019, the France Football delegation that came to present Lionel Messi with his sixth Ballon d’Or had barely begun their interview when the information was already leaking to the Spanish press. Pascal Ferré, the magazine’s director until 2022, recounts this episode in his book The Hidden Face of the Ballon d’Or.

The trip had been meticulously prepared. Ferré and his team had carried the trophy as hand luggage from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, avoided curious onlookers upon arrival in Catalonia, and evaded the security guards protecting the Argentine striker’s residence. To no avail: barely had the interview begun when Messi’s agent, Marcelo Méndez, received an alert from a Spanish media outlet reporting “almost in real time” the presence of the magazine’s team on site.

“In such cases, inevitably, everyone eyes each other suspiciously. Who talked? Where did the information come from?” Ferré writes. The airport lead was quickly ruled out, lacking photos to support the leak. The Messi camp’s involvement was dismissed just as readily. The journalist turned his suspicions inward to the magazine itself: “It is possible that certain malice and compromises stemmed from an implausible chain of complicity originating from our internal travel services.”

One person was allegedly summoned, but “will never confess,” he specifies. Nine years after the facts, “the mystery remains over this troubling coincidence, officially at least”.

These revelations come a week before the 70th Ballon d’Or ceremony, scheduled for October 26 in London. For this edition, no reliable information appears to have leaked so far. The announced presence of Lionel Messi to present the trophy, however, fuels speculation around Lamine Yamal, his successor at Barcelona, as a possible winner.