Antoine Griezmann has officially joined football’s elite on the Riviera, picking up the 2024 Golden Foot Award — a distinction reserved for players who have shaped the sport not just with medals, but with personality, flair and longevity. The French forward now succeeds Lautaro Martínez, adding his name to a roll of honour that has been etched into Monaco’s coastline since 2003.
For a decade and a half he has embodied Atlético Madrid’s heartbeat — energy, work rate, creativity and that famous left foot which helped France lift their second World Cup. At 34, the man long known as Grizi has secured a place among more than 140 football greats whose footprints form Monaco’s Promenade des Champions, a project launched by agent and award founder Antonio Caliendo to ensure legends are preserved in more than dusty archive footage.
Griezmann wasn’t in the Principality for the ceremony at Rampoldi on the evening of Thursday, November 27, but he sent a characteristically honest message, grateful if slightly overwhelmed: “It makes me proud to see my name linked to this award. More than anything, I want to be remembered as someone who played with joy, who fought for every ball, who loved football for real.”
He hopes to visit soon with his wife and children — ready to stand before the plaque that guarantees his legacy will outlive his final whistle.
The women’s Golden Foot went to Nadia Nadim, Afghan-born international, surgeon and UNESCO goodwill ambassador — a unanimous choice, and a reminder that football stories aren’t only written with goals. France’s 1998 world champions Christian Karembeu and Alain Boghossian were also inducted, further deepening the Promenade’s star-studded footprint.
Behind the ceremony lay ambition. The Golden Foot organisers revealed plans for a digital future: archives, video testimonies and autographs accessible via QR code, turning a simple seafront stroll into something closer to a living museum. New plaques — cast in gold, naturally — are also planned, with the first belonging to Prince Albert II, who has long championed the project’s growth.
Two decades after Caliendo decided that footballing immortality deserved a physical home, Monaco’s promenade remains its most glamorous shrine — admired, copied, but never bettered. And now, among Pelé and Maradona, a grinning Frenchman with a ponytail takes his place.
Antoine Griezmann: winner, workhorse, entertainer — and now, officially, a name set in stone by the sea.
