Ballon d’Or scandal: Juvenal insists 2013 votes changed

Juvenal Edjogo said his votes for the Ballon d’Or in 2013 somehow got changed to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo despite voting for other players.

Ex-captain of the Equatorial Guinea national team Juvenal Edjogo dropped a bomb when he was speaking with the Spanish sports network Gol Play. Talking about the Ballon d’Or awards, Juvenal said that back in 2013, he voted for Didier Drogba and Andrés Iniesta, but when the voting was made public, under his name were listed Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

“What little I can say about this type of award is that in 2013, I voted for my three players for the Ballon d’Or, and I sent my votes, and in the end when it was made public, the list of who voted for whom, my votes were different,” Juvenal told Gol Play.

“It said I voted for Messi, Cristiano, and I don’t know who else, but I didn’t vote for any of them. That’s why I say, I don’t believe in absolutely anything about those awards.”

Juvenal’s name not on list of 2013 voters

Juvenal said he never told anyone about the mistake because he didn’t care much. It only served to make him stop believing the the awards mean anything at all. “Since then, I’ve thought these awards have no value.”

Interestingly, Juvenal’s name is not actually listed on the public votes from 2013. On FIFA’s published results from that year, the voter for Equatorial Guinea is a journalist named David Monsuy, who is listed as having voted for Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Touré Yaya.

When Diario AS reached out to Juvenal for comment, he told us that he definitely voted in the 2013 Ballon d’Or and he definitely voted for Drogba, Iniesta, and Rodamel Falcao.

“For the 2013 Ballon d’Or whose ballots were sent in September or October 2012, the only ones who voted were coaches and captains,” said Juvenal. “I was the captain of the Equatorial Guinea national team for more than 10 years and I sent my votes to Drogba, Iniesta and Falcao through a link that we had to fill in after downloading. I don’t know if my votes didn’t reach FIFA because a journalist impersonated me. This topic did not matter to me at the time and I do not care now. I simply said that I voted for some players and in the end those votes did not reach their destination. I think I wasn’t the only one to whom something similar happened.”

Previous reports claim voter fraud in 2013

At the time of the 2013 Ballon d’Or results, other reports, including from Spanish paper Mundo Deportivo, Danish publication BT and Norweigan publication Dagbladet detailed that several coaches claimed voter fraud, saying their votes had been changed as well.

Although France Football magazine has generally run these awards, world football’s governing body took control for a few years between 2010 and 2015, a period dominated by Messi and Ronaldo.