A Ballot Without VAR: When Football Must Pick One Winner by Rule

On the night of September 14, 2026, in Los Angeles, the American Academy of Television Arts & Sciences handed out the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards. In the Outstanding Variety Series category, the organisers did not rank the nominees against one another and then pick the highest scorer. They assessed each nominee independently against a voter-approval threshold. The result: The Late Show With Stephen Colbert became the "sole winner" — after CBS had ended the programme after 11 years, with its final episode airing on May 21, 2026. On the night, Stephen Colbert also used the podium to publicly appeal to the industry: his production team was available, and the industry should hire them.

Anyone working in football looks at that and sees something unfamiliar. We have never had an award that works on such a model. Perhaps that is exactly why every argument over football ballots has never been settled by process — only dampened by emotion. When the 2026 Ballon d'Or called Rodri instead of Vinícius Júnior, most of the debate circled the question of who deserved it more, not the question of what result the system was designed to produce.

Three systems, three philosophies

The Ballon d'Or is run by France Football and decided by the votes of international sports journalists. FIFA The Best rests on four voter groups: national team captains, head coaches, journalists and fans. The PFA Player of the Year in England is voted by the players themselves. Three systems, three different definitions of "the most deserving".

What stands out is that all three use a ranking model. Each voter orders the candidates, the system adds up the points, and the highest score wins. This is a relative model: one person's result depends on where another is placed. The Emmy model is the reverse. Each nominee is measured independently against a threshold, not against the others. The consequence is that you can have multiple winners, one winner, or no winner at all.

In football, we have never allowed the possibility of "no winner". There is no mechanism to say that this year nobody reached the threshold, so no award is given. That is a design choice, not a law of nature. And it explains why, every year at voting time, we witness exactly the same kind of argument: the winner is doubted, the loser is mourned, and nothing is ever verified.

The ballot and the whistle share one nature

Seen through the referee's eye, a ballot and a whistle share the same nature: both are acts of imposing a verdict on an entity that cannot defend itself in words. A referee awarding a penalty in the 90th minute and a voter placing Rodri above Vinícius both produce an irreversible result, because no VAR can replay a ballot. An outstanding referee is only remembered after everyone has had to review the footage — whereas an outstanding voter is never asked to review anything, because there is nothing to review.

VAR does not find the truth; it only exposes what the referee chose to overlook. Set beside that, football's voting systems sit far back in the pre-VAR era. No footage, no detailed vote disclosure, no route of appeal. Only a final number and a ceremony.

This is where a television award and a football award meet, and then diverge. The American Academy of Television Arts & Sciences actively rewrote its rules to create a technically more transparent mechanism, even though that mechanism produced a less emotionally predictable outcome. Football kept its ranking model because it is familiar, yet never published enough data for outsiders to verify.

The price of a single number

I have followed voting cycles in two different environments — Europe and China — for many years, and the thing that repeats surprisingly is not bias, but silence. In Europe, when a result is contested, the press calls for detailed vote disclosure, but rarely gets it. In China, where I work, the standard of judgment carries a visibly local cultural imprint: the same situation, the same international rulebook, but a different level of acceptance. Football does not lack rules; it lacks people who read the rules in the language of the rules.

When Vinícius Júnior lost the 2026 Ballon d'Or, the wave of reaction focused on emotion rather than process. Nobody asked which voter group produced the gap. Nobody checked how many voters returned blank ballots. Nobody compared the criteria across years. This means one thing: a system that does not publish its data will always be judged on faith, and faith cannot be transferred like a contract.

Law 12 does not explain the incident; it only determines who must carry the responsibility. In voting, the same holds: no law explains why one person wins, only a number that assigns who will carry the glory or the grievance for the next twelve months.

A contrarian view: the winner does not need transparency more — the loser does

The conventional argument says that ballot transparency benefits everyone. Looked at more closely, that is not quite true. Winners tend not to want to dig into the mechanism, because the result already leaned their way. It is the loser — and their community — who has the incentive to demand the black box be opened.

This creates a governance paradox: transparency is only genuinely pushed for once an injustice has already occurred, not while a system is running smoothly. Football has never proactively designed a new mechanism for the common good; it only fixes things after a crisis. That is why we have VAR to handle contentious incidents, but nothing equivalent to handle contentious ballots.

The Emmy ceremony just past showed something else interesting: once a mechanism is sufficiently transparent and sufficiently tight, the result may lose some emotional weight, but it gains legitimacy. Colbert won in a season in which his programme had been ended by the network after 11 years. He is not a winner made by one night of tragedy — he won under a set of criteria already defined for a specific category. The difference between these two ways of winning matters more than their surface appearance.

On the labour market: the part nobody says out loud

There is another detail football should read more carefully than the award itself. When a programme ends after 11 years, an entire production team — writers, producers and many technical roles — becomes freelance labour overnight. The host had to use the awards podium itself to say that they need work.

In football, an equivalent event happens every time a coaching staff is replaced. A whole block of assistants, data analysts and fitness specialists leaves together with one person. They become a market with no transfer window, no deadline day, no one acting as referee. The transfer market is a match without a referee, until someone files a claim.

I once reviewed 15 player contracts in a continental-level league in 2026, when competitions were suspended by the pandemic. The result: 12 of 15 contained no force majeure clause. Three clubs cut wages by 40 percent. Two clubs owed up to two months of salary. Five disputes went to the federation. An event closing after many years, whether in television or football, pushes people into the same state: skilled, experienced, and with no rulebook protecting them unless they prepared in advance.

That is why I have always held that the right question is not "who deserves to win", but "is the system transparent enough for the result to stand when it is challenged".

Looking forward

A penalty is a deal; each step of the run-up is a clause that cannot be amended. A ballot is the same. Once cast, it cannot come back. The only thing left to do is design the system so that the result, whether it delights or grieves someone, still stands up to the question "why".

Football may not need to learn how to hand out awards from a television awards show. But football needs to learn how to publish data. The day a Ballon d'Or ballot can be reviewed like an incident in the penalty area will be the day football genuinely matures in governance. Until then, every season that passes, we will have one more winner — and one more person who will never know why they lost.