Ballon d'Or Owner Groupe Amaury Readies Criminal Complaint Over $200K Betting

Groupe Amaury, the company that owns France Football and stages the Ballon d'Or awards, has said it is preparing a criminal complaint following a series of wagers placed through anonymous prediction-market accounts that reportedly generated close to $200,000 in profits. The company confirmed the move on Saturday, signalling that the organisers intend to involve law enforcement over the trading activity.

The bets in question were not simply wagers on who would win. According to the accounts described, the positions centred on the precise finishing order of the leading players in the ranking — a level of accuracy that organisers regard as suspicious rather than coincidental. Hitting an exact sequence across multiple places is considerably harder than picking a single winner, which is why the pattern drew attention.

The Ballon d'Or is one of football's most closely followed individual honours, presented annually by France Football, which Groupe Amaury owns. Because the outcome is decided through an internal process before it is publicly announced, the result is closely guarded until the ceremony — making any accurate advance knowledge of the final standings commercially valuable to anyone able to trade on it.

Prediction markets allow users to buy and sell positions on future events, and they have grown into a sizeable niche alongside conventional sportsbooks. Their appeal to regulators and investigators lies in the public record they leave: prices, timing and account activity can all be reconstructed after the fact, which can help establish whether traders acted on information that was not publicly available.

The accounts involved have been described as anonymous, and no individuals have been publicly identified in connection with the trading. Groupe Amaury has not indicated when the complaint will be filed or which authorities will receive it. It also remains unclear whether the platforms hosting the markets have been contacted or have opened any review of their own.

For now, the affair rests on the organisers' public statement and the reported scale of the profits. Whether the complaint leads to a formal investigation — and whether the trades are found to have been informed by non-public knowledge or merely fortunate — has yet to be established.