The Doue Ballon d’Or vote is no longer just a matter of speculation. Days after Desire Doue was left out of the 30-man shortlist for this year’s award, France Football’s own staff have gone on the record to explain how the Paris Saint-Germain forward came so close to the list and still ended up outside it — and the margin, by their account, was about as thin as it gets.
Doue finished 31st in the Ballon d’Or vote, say France Football
Olivier Bossard, a journalist for France Football, appearing on the programme L’Equipe de Greg, said the 21-year-old finished “31st or 32nd on the list”, per Get French Football News. One place. Maybe two.
“Right up to the end, some people tried to get him into the top 30,” Bossard said. “But those who didn’t include him ultimately felt that the competition had worked against him, particularly the competition with Barcola. One moment it was Barcola, the next it was him.”
That is the crux of it. Voters were not asked to judge Doue in isolation; they judged him alongside a team-mate who occupied much the same space on the pitch and in the France squad, and the two of them appear to have cancelled each other out.
Vincent Garcia: ‘interchangeable players’
Vincent Garcia, editor-in-chief of France Football — the magazine that organises the award — felt moved to publish an explanation in L’Equipe, and reached the same conclusion from the other direction.
“Out goes Desire Doue, who has often shared the limelight and the statistics with Bradley Barcola,” Garcia wrote. “Their status as interchangeable players, both at club level and for Les Bleus, and their lack of consistency throughout a season marked by alternating spells of good form and time on the bench, did not help their individual records.”
It is a revealing choice of words for anyone who watched Paris last season. “Interchangeable” was, in Luis Enrique’s system, closer to a compliment than a criticism: the coach rotated his wide forwards relentlessly and won a second consecutive Champions League doing it. In a vote built around individual narratives, the same quality reads as the absence of one.
Barcola ‘received very few votes’
Bradley Barcola’s case, by France Football’s account, was not close at all. Bossard said the 24-year-old — who left the Parc for Liverpool on deadline day and is now a former club team-mate of Doue’s — “received very few votes”.
“In the French national team, we had the impression that Doue was in the lead, but in the end, at the last moment, Barcola proved to be the better player and was used more by Deschamps,” Bossard added. “You have to make a real impact to be on this list, and it was felt that he had made less of an impact than the previous season and that he’d found it a bit hard to come to terms with.”
So the pair were weighed against each other, and neither survived it. The player judged to have edged the argument for France barely registered with the electorate; the player judged to have lost it finished one place off the shortlist.
What it means for Paris
None of this leaves PSG short of representation. Nine of the 30 nominees are Paris players, per Get French Football News, the same figure as last year, with reigning winner Ousmane Dembele among them and the ceremony set for Paris on 26 October. You can read our full breakdown of the nine Parisiens on the shortlist, and our original report on the Doue omission, which set out the 13 goals and 11 assists that made his exclusion look so strange in the first place.
What has changed this week is that the explanation is now public, and it is not the one many expected. Doue was not overlooked because the voters thought little of him. He was overlooked because they could not separate him from a team-mate — and a shortlist of 30 had room for neither. For a forward who only turned 21 this year, that is a frustrating way to miss out, and a fairly easy one to put right.
