Football’s dignitaries gather at the London Palladium on Monday for the Ballon d’Or ceremony, a setting that could scarcely be further removed from the award’s first presentation 70 years ago. That took place in the rather less glamorous surroundings of Blackpool town hall, where Stanley Matthews was handed the prize by Gabriel Hanot, the L’Équipe editor who conceived the idea of crowning the world’s best player each year.
The move to England, away from the ceremony’s usual home in Paris, is intended as a mark of respect to Matthews. A specially commissioned china plate was presented to him by the town’s mayor on that first occasion, before the 41-year-old — famously teetotal — gave a short speech. “He might have had a double carrot juice that day,” said 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.”
Matthews’s career began with his local side Stoke in 1932 and earned him the nickname the Wizard of Dribble, along with a reputation as the most famous player on the planet. In 1965 he became the first active player to receive a knighthood, a few months before retiring at the age of 50. He remains the oldest winner of the Ballon d’Or, and won the last of his 54 England caps in 1957 at 42 — a tally that would have been higher but for the second world war.
His son believes he was far ahead of his time in how he prepared. “The way he trained, his football boots … they were so light, they were like slippers so that he could move quicker,” he said. “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.” His work ethic is said to have come from his father, Jack, a renowned boxer known as the Fighting Barber of Hanley. Matthews owned a Blackpool hotel that regularly welcomed celebrities including the comedian Charlie Chester, and was known for early morning fitness routines on the beach that helped prolong his career.
Matthews Jr suspects his father could have lasted even longer in the modern 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 said. The financial gulf between then and now is stark: while the favourites for this year’s award are multimillionaires, Matthews earned at most £20 a week until the maximum wage was abolished in 1961. Joe Pierce, producer of the 2017 film Matthews, compared his standing to that of the leading American sportsman of the era. “We compared it to the top sportsman in the US at the time, which was Joe DiMaggio,” he said. “He was at the height of his career, and he had just signed a contract for $100,000 a year.”
That disparity led to a series of business ventures, including his own football boot brand, hats, books and a vegetable juice — an enterprise that did not endure. “He tried to do it in cans, but it didn’t work out,” Pierce said. “There was a problem because it went bad in the cans.” Matthews also supplemented his income by coaching overseas in the off-season, visiting an African country each summer between 1953 and 1978. A few months after winning the Ballon d’Or he travelled to Ghana to play exhibition matches celebrating its independence, where he was presented with an ivory sword and crowned a “soccerhene”, or soccer chief. “The King of Ghana – that’s what they called him,” Matthews Jr said. “My sister still has the stool that he was crowned on.”
He developed a particular affinity for South Africa, coaching a team in Soweto during the mid-70s who became known as Stan’s Men, securing them sponsorship from Coca-Cola and taking them to a tournament in Brazil. Pierce was struck by the lengths Matthews went to despite 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 said. “He was good friends with the Duke of Edinburgh … So he had connections in high places that probably helped quite a bit.” Matthews Jr added that his father was proud of having been banned at one stage. “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.”
His association with Stan’s Men ended after the 1976 Soweto Uprising, with one player in the film describing how the break in contact left a “hole in my heart”. Matthews died in 2000 at the age of 85, and more than 100,000 people turned out in Stoke for a funeral the Guardian described as the biggest public funeral since Winston Churchill’s. Pierce reflected on the record 78 African players in the Premier League last season: “He’s probably sitting there saying: ‘I told you so.’” 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.