On the evening of October 30, the 67th Ballon d'Or awards ceremony took place in France. The world's best football players gathered at the Châtelet Theater in Paris to witness the presentation of individual awards. Many top streamers followed the event live, with some content creators even attending the event in person. Streams Charts has calculated which streamers attracted the most viewers.
The Ballon d'Or 2023 ceremony was streamed on Twitch, YouTube Live, and other platforms. In total, we counted over 1.7K Unique Channels, including all channels that in some way covered the event. For example, Spanish streamer ibai co-broadcasted the award presentation ceremony on his personal channel, while American streamer iShowSpeed was a guest at the event, providing an IRL stream and interacting with the star football players. During that broadcast, iShowSpeed set the new Peak Viewers record for his channel and entered top 10 most popular English-speaking solo streamers of all time with more than 548.3K Peak Viewers.
Streams of the Ballon d'Or 2023 ceremony collectively reached 6.7 million Hours Watched. This is comparable to such sports events as the Sidemen Charity Match 2023 and GP Explorer 2, as well as esports tournaments like ALGS: 2023 Split 1 Playoffs and IEM Sydney 2023. The most popular broadcast was on ibai's channel, with over 690.8K Peak Viewers. By the way, this was the most popular broadcast among all streamers in October. Among other popular content creators who covered the Ballon d'Or 2023 ceremony, we can also mention eliasn97 from Germany and DjMaRiiO from Spain.
In terms of language distribution, Spanish-language broadcasts had the highest audience coverage, accounting for approximately 50% of the total Hours Watched for all ceremony broadcasts. Streams in English accounted for around 29% of HW. French broadcasts took third place with a result of 12%.
Lionel Messi is the most talked-about football player in the world. He is often mentioned in the media and social networks, including Twitch chats. On regular days, Messi is mentioned around 12K-14K times, however, on the day of the ceremony, this number nearly rose to 95K. In comparison, Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappe received 20K and 15K mentions, respectively, on the day of the ceremony. It is interesting to note that Mbappe is mentioned more often on regular days, but unlike Haaland, he did not receive any award at the ceremony, which is why Twitch viewers discussed Norwegian more frequently on that day.
The winner of the prestigious Ballon d'Or award is Lionel Messi, who plays for "Inter Miami" in the MLS. This award is his eighth in his career, an absolute record in the history of the award. Among the female football players, the Ballon d'Or was awarded to Spanish player Aitana Bonmati from "Barcelona". Englishman Jude Bellingham from "Real Madrid" was named the best young football player. Argentinian sportsman Emiliano Martinez from "Aston Villa" was recognized as the best goalkeeper. Norwegian forward Erling Haaland from "Manchester City" received the Gerd Muller Trophy. His team has also been named Club of the Year for the second year in a row.
