Как мы провели свой Золотой мяч и нарисовали в Варшаве 10-метрового Левандовского, нападающего «Баварии» и Польши

In the middle of summer, France Football announced the cancellation of the Ballon d'Or, the main individual award in world football. Even if you are not very interested in sports, at least once in your life you have definitely heard about the Golden Ball - in the context of Lev Yashin, the only goalkeeper in history who was honored with this award.

The reason for the cancellation is the pandemic, which knocked down the rhythm and suspended all world championships for several months, and postponed Euro 2020 to the next year altogether.

France Football acted at least recklessly - even with such a strange calendar, there were so many phenomenal things in 2020 that there were many truly outstanding contenders for the award.

Of course, we immediately wanted to make our own "Ballon d'Or", although we soberly assessed our capabilities and understood that we were definitely not able to hold a ceremony similar in scale to what France Football is doing. Yes, and there are difficulties with access to the best players in the world - even if we make our own unique statuette, it will be difficult to organize the presentation and, as a result, we will have to catch the winner somewhere in the hotel lobby, hastily hand over and photograph the player with the award in slippers, a dressing gown and sleepy face. In general, it is definitely not our option.

Doubts disappeared when we realized two things. Firstly, the award should be presented not to a football player (any top sportsman has so many statuettes that a museum can be opened), but to fans. But how to give something to everyone at once? And here's how: you need to make a big graffiti in the hometown of the winner, so that the residents walk by and rejoice that their compatriot is the best in the world.

Secondly, that the best should not be chosen by journalists, but by these very fans. And it should not be a boring "highbrow" choice, but an addictive game that will make fans wonder - who is really the best player of the year?

We took a tinder mechanic and adapted it to fit our needs: the user was shown a random pair of players and he had to choose a more worthy one from them. And so - an infinite number of absolutely random pairs of players from the short list compiled by our editors. The winner is the player with the highest percentage of won "single combats".

On July 18, France Football made an announcement about the cancellation of its award, a week later, potential sponsors had an already formulated idea, and two weeks later we received confirmation from colleagues from Parimatch to become partners of the project. In addition to the naming and visual part, we added competitive mechanics to the project - each voting participant, having registered on the Parimatch website or mobile application, became a participant in the drawing of 100,000 rubles.

On September 21, we launched the project, the voting lasted about two weeks - until October 2. During this time, more than 240,000 unique users visited the Golden Ball page and voted 3,000,000 times - that is, each user passed on average more than ten pairs of applicants. And several users clicked over a hundred cards!

The competition, which we launched on the project together with our partner Parimatch, attracted more than 5 thousand registrations, and in total from the Parimatch project it received more than 20 thousand conversions - impressive numbers for an image project.

Warsaw city center, Aleja Solidarnosci street

With the winner of the intrigue did not work - from the very first day the leadership was confidently seized by the forward of "Bavaria" Robert Lewandowski. We assumed in advance that this would happen, but just in case we were looking for options for performers in Belgium, Brazil and Argentina. Robert was born in Warsaw, so the choice fell on the artist with the pseudonym Pieksa. Through his managers, all timings were agreed and a wall was chosen - the very center of the city, a street under the symbolic name of the Alley of Solidarity (Aleja Solidarnosci). The work began on November 2, and already on the 7th we saw the final drawing and the source code of the video materials that the artist's team had prepared for us.