Clashes with police and glaring blunders: chaos hits the Ballon d'Or ceremony

Traffic in London can cause problems on any given day. Unluckily for the organisers of the Ballon d'Or ceremony, they chose to hold a major event just a few steps from Oxford Street on the very same day the famous shopping district became traffic-free.

Combine that with the large crowds at the entrance, and a significant number of guests arrived late. Organisers pushed the start back by 45 minutes.

A noisy, enthusiastic crowd then sat through proceedings lasting nearly two and a half hours. Hosts Kate Scott and Thierry Henry had to pause the broadcast on several occasions while fans chanted the players' names, and booing broke out during the advertising breaks.

Harry Kane and Alexia Putellas took the two main categories, then faced the world's media in separate press conferences.

Putellas fielded questions from journalists. Kane did not get the same mix: only men were picked to ask him a question, with several female journalists apparently ignored. The Ballon d'Or award team apologised for it.

Hundreds gathered outside the London Palladium hoping to glimpse football's brightest stars on the red carpet. Metal fences and barriers formed a security cordon to keep out anyone without a ticket.

Those barriers didn't hold. The BBC Sport team watched fans climb them, break them and tear them down, with security ejecting many who forced their way through.

Tensions boiled over at times. Footage on social media showed clashes between fans, security staff and police.

A Metropolitan Police spokesperson told BBC Sport that officers had been asked to assist "after concerns were raised about the behaviour of the crowds and the potential for a breach of public order".

The statement read: "A dispersal order was issued under Section 35 at 19:49 GMT, and it remained in effect until 04:00 on Tuesday 27 October".

It added: "Officers dispersed the crowd, which began throwing scaffolding clips and bricks at the police. None of the officers were injured".

According to the force, officers later dealt with "a relatively small number of individuals who had climbed a neighbouring building".

Police arrested two people, one for breaching the dispersal order and the other on charges of rioting and disorderly conduct.

Chaos broke out hours before the ceremony began, when the official Ballon d'Or website published an article announcing Harry Kane as the winner of the men's award.

Dig a little deeper and it got stranger still. Similar articles had gone up about several other candidates for the men's and women's prizes, among them Real Madrid's Kylian Mbappé and London City Lionesses' Bouhaddi.

So was it a genuine mistake? Or a ploy to draw attention away from that first Kane announcement, which, of course, turned out to be true?

A Ballon d'Or spokesperson told BBC Sport last night that the piece had been "published online by mistake".

"These articles were prepared for all the candidates and should in no way be regarded as an indication of the final results or rankings," the official spokesperson said.

The confusion spread to social media too. The official Ballon d'Or accounts wrongly named two of the female candidates, congratulating "Alexia Putellas" on her win before deleting the post.