The Apologies.
Honorary Golden Balls

The rule of 1956 — only players at European clubs — excluded the greatest player of the century's first half from its greatest individual award. Pelé won three World Cups (1958, 1962, 1970), scored more than a thousand goals, and never appeared on a Ballon d'Or ballot. In 2013, during the award's FIFA years, the omission was formally repaired: an honorary Ballon d'Or, handed over in Zurich fifty-five years late. He accepted it with a joke about the wait, which is the only proportionate response to half a century of bureaucratic silence.

Maradona's case was the rule's second casualty: the 1986 World Cup won essentially alone, the 1990 final reached the same way, Naples taken from Italy's north to its only two Scudetti — and no Ballon d'Or, because he played his greatest football either before the rule's 1995 reform or at clubs the rule's text had already forgiven. France Football repaired the omission in 1995, the year the door opened, with an honorary award. He remains the only player ever voted the World Cup's greatest by a panel that also gave FIFA's own award to the same man and changed nothing.

In 1989, for the magazine's anniversary, France Football issued a prize it has never issued again: the Super Ballon d'Or, awarded once, to one player, chosen by readers and a jury from among the greatest of the award's first three decades. Di Stéfano — the engine of Real Madrid's five consecutive European Cups, the winner of 1957 and 1959 — beat Cruyff and Platini to it. The trophy is reported to rest in the club's museum at the Bernabéu, and no second Super Ballon has ever been struck: the award's closed chapter, and its rarest object.