Last updated: 5 Oct 2026 | 3 Views |
When we look at the golden ball of the Ballon d'Or, we see only the finished result. But according to the goldsmiths at Mellerio, the maker of the trophy, each one begins around six months before delivery and takes close to one hundred hours of work. In 2026, the year the award turns 70, that number deserves as much attention as the name of the winner.
The 2026 ceremony takes place on Monday, October 26, at the London Palladium Theatre. It is the first time the event has been held in London, a tribute to Stanley Matthews, the Englishman who received the very first Ballon d'Or in 1956. Since 2024, France Football and UEFA have organised the ceremony together. The men's category has 30 nominees, including Kylian Mbappé, Vinícius Júnior, Rodri and Erling Haaland. The women's category also has 30, including Alexia Putellas, Ewa Pajor and Pernille Harder. Beyond the main prizes, there are awards for goalkeeper, coach, club, young talent and striker, as well as the Sócrates Award.
Mellerio, a historic French jewellery house, has made the trophy since 1956, and it also makes the Roland Garros trophies. According to the goldsmiths' own account, the process begins with brass, which is shaped into two hemispheres using the repoussé technique. The halves are then welded together and strengthened with silver. The seams of a football are traced and engraved by hand. The whole ball receives a coating of gold and is then joined to its base. That base is a block of natural pyrite, carved to fit the ball, and Soccer Bible reports that it is unique each year. A brass plaque is engraved with the France Football logo, the year of the edition and the winner's name. The current design was created by François Mellerio.
One of the house's goldsmiths summed up the craft in a single sentence: everything relies on manual adjustments, and that is where the complexity and beauty of the goldsmith's work lie. In the Sports Illustrated account, the production is described as still profoundly artisanal, and compared to following a cooking recipe with precise steps. Read together, these statements describe a trophy that gets its shine from a process done one step at a time, with no step skipped, and with plenty of time given to each.
The women's Ballon d'Or, introduced in 2018, uses the same design as the men's award. In other words, the object that will be lifted by the winners in London, whether men or women, looks the same, and that shared form has outlasted seven decades of change in the sport itself.
The same theme of time and patience appears in the stories of the Thai athletes who have just won gold at the 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya.
Nattanicha Jongprongklang, known as "Focus", a Thai-New Zealand boxer, beat Pang Chol-mi of North Korea 4-1 in the women's 54kg final. It was Thailand's 15th gold of these Games. She was knocked down in the second round, yet she recovered and landed clean punches through to the end of the three rounds, winning on the judges' decision. She is the first Thai woman to win Asian Games boxing gold since women's boxing joined the Games in 2010, and it was Thailand's first and only boxing medal at these Games. Her opponent had won world flyweight titles in 2018 and 2025 and a bronze medal in the 2024 Olympic bantamweight division.
Sophia Montgomery, a 23-year-old Thai-American sailor, won the women's dinghy (ILCA6) gold on October 2 after nine qualifying races, in which she accumulated just 21 penalty points with her worst score discarded. In the final round she added only five more across two races, finishing on 26 points, the lowest of all competitors. It was Thailand's 13th gold of the Games. She had competed in the same class at the Paris 2024 Olympics, and her win secures Thailand a quota place in the women's dinghy event at Los Angeles 2028.
On October 3, Orapa Senatham won Thailand's first Asian Games gold in jiu-jitsu, in the women's under-63kg category. She beat Aisha Alnebi of the United Arab Emirates in the round of 16, Andrea Lui Leo of the Philippines in the quarter-finals and Yama Aishaqat of Jordan in the semi-finals. In the final she defeated Alexandria Luz Enriquez of the Philippines on points. It was her second major international title, after gold at the 2025 World Games. Thailand also added a bronze medal in jiu-jitsu at the same Games.
Sailing delivered another gold a day later. Pinchanok Klaissomboon, 16, won the girls' dinghy (ILCA4) title at Kaiyoh Yacht Harbour in Aichi Prefecture, finishing all 12 races with 25 penalty points against 29 for the runner-up from Hong Kong. It was Thailand's 17th gold of the Games, and Thailand also took silver in the mixed 420 class through Pitiphum Charoenphon and Worakarn Saksriklom. Thailand had set a target of 14 golds for Japan, and Bangkok Post reported that the team had surpassed it.
These stories took place within days of each other, only a few weeks before the ceremony in London. They do not show that one athlete tried harder than another. What the facts do show is a shared pattern: what the public sees on the podium or on a ceremony stage usually arrives alongside a process that takes time. Focus had to get up after being knocked down. Montgomery built on her Olympic experience from Paris. Orapa continued from her World Games gold in 2025 to a first Asian Games title.
On October 26, only one name in each category will be called. The golden ball lifted on stage is therefore the product of two processes: roughly six months of goldsmith's work that skips no step, and the path of an athlete who has to walk every stage of it before reaching that night. When the trophy is raised again, it is worth remembering both.
