Ballon d’Or ceremony returns to England in nod to ‘revolutionary’ Stanley Matthews

When football’s dignitaries assemble on Monday at the London Palladium for the Ballon d’Or ceremony it will be a far cry from the first awards 70 years ago. That was held in the slightly less glamorous surroundings of Blackpool town hall, where Stanley Matthews was presented with the prize by Gabriel Hanot, the visionary editor of L’Équipe who came up with the idea of crowning the world’s best player every year.

A specially commissioned china plate was also handed over by the town’s mayor before the 41-year-old Matthews, who was famously teetotal, gave a short speech. “He might have had a double carrot juice that day,” says his son, Stanley Matthews Jr, who will attend this year’s awards with his sister, Jean, and her two daughters. “There was no ceremony. ‘Here’s your Ballon d’Or, well done’, sort of thing. But obviously it’s grown over the years, and now it’s a huge event. We’re very excited.”

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The switch of venue to England from its usual home in Paris is a mark of respect to the man who became the first active player to receive a knighthood in 1965, a few months before retiring at the age of 50. It also provides an opportunity to recall an astonishing career that began with his local side Stoke in 1932 and made the “Wizard of Dribble” the most famous player on the planet.

“He was so far ahead of his time,” says Matthews Jr, a former winner of junior Wimbledon who had a successful tennis career. “The way he trained, his football boots … they were so light, they were like slippers so that he could move quicker. Towards the end of his career, when he was back at Stoke, he had the fire brigade come and water the pitch before the game so it would be a little slick, which was better for him. Now they water the pitches all the time, you know. So he was very revolutionary in all the things he did, plus his diet and his training.”

Matthews’ father, Jack, was a renowned boxer known as the Fighting Barber of Hanley and it was from him that he is said to have developed his work ethic. Matthews owned a Blackpool hotel that regularly welcomed celebrities including the comedian Charlie Chester, and was known for his early morning fitness routines on the beach that helped to prolong his career.

He remains the oldest Ballon d’Or winner and won the last of his 54 England caps – a number that would have been higher but for the second world war – in 1957 at the age of 42. Matthews Jr thinks his father could have lasted even longer in today’s possession-based game. “He would probably have thought: ‘My goodness, if all I had to do was pass the ball around, I could have played until I was 70,’ because a lot of the players just seem to be doing that, passing out from the back,” he says.

Whereas Harry Kane and the rest of the favourites for this year’s Ballon d’Or are all multimillionaires, Matthews had to make do with at most £20 a week until the maximum wage was abolished in 1961. “We compared it to the top sportsman in the US at the time, which was [baseball player] Joe DiMaggio” says Joe Pierce, who produced the 2017 film Matthews. “He was at the height of his career, and he had just signed a contract for $100,000 a year.”

That meant there were a few successful and not so successful business ventures, including his own football boot brand, hats and various books, not to mention vegetable juice. “He tried to do it in cans, but it didn’t work out,” says Pierce. “There was a problem because it went bad in the cans.”

Another way of supplementing his income was coaching overseas in the off-season and between 1953 and 1978 Matthews visited an African country each summer. His love affair with the continent grew a few months after he had won the Ballon d’Or when he arrived in Ghana to play a series of exhibition matches to celebrate its independence. He was presented with an ivory sword and crowned as a “soccerhene” (soccer chief). “The King of Ghana – that’s what they called him,” says Matthews Jr. “My sister still has the stool that he was crowned on.”

Matthews developed a particular affinity for South Africa. He started coaching a team in Soweto during the mid-70s who became known as Stan’s Men and secured them sponsorship from Coca-Cola before taking them to play in a tournament in Brazil. Pierce was surprised when he discovered the lengths Matthews went to under significant pressure from the apartheid government not to travel.

“There was real drama and back and forth. The UK government was involved. The South African government was involved. There were spies involved – the South African spies at the camps and around – and he just kept pushing forward. He was good friends with the Duke of Edinburgh – they would get invited over for tea and things like that. So he had connections in high places that probably helped quite a bit.”

Matthews Jr says: “He was very proud of the fact that at one stage he was banned. He said: ‘Frank Sinatra was banned as well.’ So he thought that was kind of funny. I remember him saying that the South African players had so much speed and so much talent. Dad just liked people. And he knew that they had or he thought that they had a good talent. He just wanted to see if he could help them improve.”

His association with Stan’s Men ended after the 1976 Soweto Uprising, with one player in the film describing how ending contact with Matthews left a “hole in my heart”. Matthews’ death in 2000 at the age of 85 also evoked strong emotions, with more than 100,000 people turning out in Stoke for what the Guardian called the biggest public funeral since Winston Churchill.

“He’s probably sitting there saying: ‘I told you so,’” Pierce says of the record 78 African players in the Premier League last season. Only one African player – George Weah – and three Englishmen – Bobby Charlton, Kevin Keegan and Michael Owen – have followed Matthews in winning the Ballon d’Or. Whoever is chosen this year will be following in the footsteps of one of the sport’s most celebrated figures.