The 2026 Ballon d’Or ceremony is being staged at the London Palladium on Monday night, with proceedings set to begin at 20:00 local time. Marquinhos is on the men’s shortlist. He will not be in the room.
According to Get French Football News, the PSG captain opted to remain in Paris for the club’s Ligue 1 fixture against Olympique Lyonnais at the Parc des Princes, which kicks off shortly before the London ceremony begins. The Brazilian defender is currently sidelined with a thigh injury picked up against Barcelona and would have been available to travel.
The fixture that moved everything
The Lyon match was not originally scheduled for Monday. Paris Saint-Germain had been set to host their title rivals on Sunday 25 October at 8.45pm local time, but the Paris Police Prefecture prohibited that fixture and the Ligue de Football Professionnel moved kick-off to Monday 26 October at 8.30pm local time at the Parc des Princes.
Two factors drove the decision. Fresh demonstrations were planned in the French capital after the protests and rioting that followed the 17 October mobilisation. On top of that, the NFL staged a regular-season game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New Orleans Saints at the Stade de France on the Sunday, and French authorities decided they could not police all of it in parallel.
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Kvaratskhelia on a plane, not a red carpet
Marquinhos is not the only PSG nominee missing from London. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia will also skip the ceremony, but for a very different reason: the Georgia international is travelling to Doha for knee surgery after rupturing his ACL in the 4-2 Champions League win over Barcelona on Tuesday 21 October, which Sky Sports confirmed will keep him out long term. Reports in France have placed the procedure at the Aspetar clinic in the Qatari capital.
The Barcelona match proved a brutal evening for Luis Enrique’s squad. Beyond Kvaratskhelia’s ACL, both Marquinhos and Ousmane Dembélé picked up thigh problems in the same game, leaving three nominees nursing injuries less than a week before the biggest individual night in the sport.
A record year, a thinned-out room
PSG set a club record this year with ten players on the men’s shortlist, surpassing the nine they had in 2025. The others are Achraf Hakimi, Nuno Mendes, João Neves, Willian Pacho, Fabián Ruiz, Ferran Torres and Vitinha, with Dembélé the reigning winner.
But with the Lyon match pushed back twenty-four hours, the vast majority of that cohort will be at the Parc des Princes rather than on the Thames. Something similar played out in 2025, when a weather-rescheduled trip to Marseille kept most of PSG’s nominees away from the ceremony. Dembélé lifted the trophy that night only because an injury had already ruled him out of the match.
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Harry Kane is the bookmakers’ favourite to be named men’s winner on Monday evening, with Lamine Yamal and Dembélé among those chasing him. Whoever lifts the trophy will do so in front of a thinner Parisian delegation than the nominations list would suggest.
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