Two Paris stars left out
Two places. That is the whole gap between Desire Doue and a spot on the Ballon d’Or 2026 shortlist France Football published yesterday. PSG put 10 players on that list, a record for any club in this edition. Doue and Bradley Barcola were not among them.
The pair won Ligue 1 and the Champions League in the spring, sealing a second straight European crown for the club. Both played at the World Cup with France, beaten in the semi-finals before finishing fourth. Not enough.
The backlash online was instant. “Scandal” kept surfacing among PSG fans, sharpened by the presence of Julian Quinones, top scorer in the Saudi league, and Sadio Mane.
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The voters explain themselves
Vincent Garcia, editor-in-chief of France Football, gave the first answer in L’Equipe. “Their status as players who can be swapped in and out, both for club and country, and their lack of consistency across a season marked by good spells and spells on the bench, did not help their individual case.”
Olivier Bossard, a journalist at the magazine, went further on L’Equipe de Greg. “Barcola got very few votes, while Desire Doue was almost a 50-50 call. Desire Doue finishes 31st or 32nd on this list, he’s just behind. Two places. No more.”
As for the voters who held firm: “Those who left him out ultimately felt the competition worked against him, especially the competition from Barcola.”
The scoring dried up in April
The numbers do a lot of the explaining. Doue has not scored since the second leg of the Champions League quarter-finals. Barcola stopped even earlier, nothing after the last 16. In a vote about individuals, dry spells like that get punished.
Doue had finished 14th in the 2025 Ballon d’Or. The climb stopped there. Bossard reckons he found last season’s success a little hard to absorb.
PSG supporters are not alone in their anger. In Catalonia, the absences of Raphinha and Dani Olmo have landed badly too. The trophy gets handed out in the coming weeks, and nobody is dropping this one before then.
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