In 70 years of Eurovision, no winner had ever returned their trophy in protest. Then Nemo did. Then Charlie McGettigan said he would too.
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On 11 December 2025, Nemo — winner of Eurovision 2024 in Malmö for Switzerland with The Code — handed their winner's trophy back to the European Broadcasting Union over the EBU's continued admission of Israel into the contest. The Associated Press carried the story the same day under the headline “Eurovision champion Nemo returns the winner's trophy to protest Israel's inclusion”. Days after the 2026 Grand Final in Vienna closed on 16 May, Charlie McGettigan — co-winner of Eurovision 1994 for Ireland alongside Paul Harrington with Rock 'n' Roll Kids — publicly stated that he would also return his trophy. Two former winners, 31 years apart, doing something no Eurovision winner had ever done in seven decades of the contest.
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The hero number — 70 years, 67 winners, zero prior returns
Eurovision launched on 24 May 1956 in Lugano, Switzerland, with seven competing countries. Since then the contest has run every year except 2020, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic — giving a total of 69 contests staged across the 70-year anniversary period the EBU is currently marking. Across those contests the show has produced 67 distinct winning entries, accounting for the four-way tie at Madrid 1969 (France, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom) and the small number of earlier shared-points decisions resolved before the modern tie-break rules existed.
That is sixty-seven distinct winning artists or groups, each handed a physical trophy at the end of their Grand Final. From Lys Assia in 1956 to JJ in 2025, the trophy went out and stayed out. Some winners died holding it. Some passed it to museums and broadcasters. Some, like Lordi, built a touring identity around the iconography of the win. None handed it back to the EBU in protest. Until Nemo.
What 'returning the trophy' actually means
Returning a Eurovision trophy is, in practical terms, symbolic rather than procedural. The EBU does not have a mechanism for rescinding a Eurovision win — the result is the result, the public record is the public record, and there is no provision for stripping a winner of their title after the fact. The trophy itself is the only physical object that changes hands.
What Nemo physically did on 11 December 2025 was deliver the trophy back to the EBU's offices and ask that the union take custody of it indefinitely. The EBU has not reissued the trophy. It has not been re-presented to a runner-up. The 2024 Eurovision result still officially reads “1. Switzerland — Nemo — The Code — 591 points.” What changed is the physical object's location and the publicly stated reason Nemo no longer wanted it in their possession.
McGettigan's announcement after the Vienna 2026 final is at the time of writing a stated intention to return rather than a completed physical handover. The shared-trophy element of the 1994 win adds an additional procedural wrinkle — Paul Harrington has not publicly stated whether he will participate. Regardless of the mechanics, the symbolic act is the same: a winner publicly disowning the physical token of the prize over a stated political objection to how the contest is currently run.
Why this is a 70-year first — the historical search
The claim that this is a 70-year first rests on the absence of precedent rather than on any single document. Eurovision's archival record — EBU communications, contemporaneous national broadcaster coverage in the participating countries, the Eurovision section of the Wikipedia corpus across every contest from 1956 to 2024, and standing Eurovision histories from authors including John Kennedy O'Connor and Chris West — contains no recorded instance of a winning artist or act returning their physical trophy to the EBU in protest before December 2025.
That is not the same as saying Eurovision has been free of protest politics. The 1969 contest, hosted in Franco's Madrid, was famously boycotted by Austria; political tensions around the contest hosting in Spain that year were significant and well documented. Cyprus has historically declined to award points to Turkey. The 2022 result was openly read as a wartime sympathy vote for Ukraine. Russia has been excluded since 2022. Belarus was suspended in 2021. Several broadcasters have walked out or withheld participation over the decades. Five broadcasters — RTVE (Spain), RTÉ (Ireland), AVROTROS (Netherlands), RÚV (Iceland) and RTVSLO (Slovenia) — boycotted the Vienna 2026 contest specifically over Israel's inclusion, the largest single-edition broadcaster boycott since 1970.
Protest by countries, by broadcasters, by audiences and by competing artists has all happened, repeatedly, across the 70 years. Protest by a winning artist via physical return of the trophy has not. The action Nemo took in December 2025 is genuinely without recorded precedent in the contest's seven-decade history.
Critics versus returners — the precedent table
To make the point precise, the table below contrasts well-documented public Eurovision-winner criticisms of the contest with the December 2025 trophy-return action. Each prior critic kept their trophy.
| Year | Winner | Public action | Returned trophy? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 🇦🇹 Conchita Wurst | Public commentary on Eurovision's inclusion politics across the decade following the win | No |
| 2017 | 🇵🇹 Salvador Sobral | Publicly criticised commercial Eurovision and the modern shape of the contest | No |
| 2023 | 🇸🇪 Loreen | Has continued to participate in Eurovision-adjacent events and has not made a public protest gesture against the contest | No |
| 2024 | 🇨🇭 Nemo | Returned the physical trophy to the EBU on 11 December 2025 over Israel's continued participation | Yes |
| 1994 | 🇮🇪 Charlie McGettigan (co-winner) | Publicly stated after the Vienna 2026 final that he will also return his trophy | Stated intent |
The table is not exhaustive — many former winners have made public political statements at one point or another since their win — but it covers the most-cited modern critics. The pattern across the 50/50 era is consistent: public criticism without surrender of the physical prize. Nemo's December 2025 action is the qualitative break.
The timeline — May 2025 to December 2025
Nemo did not return the trophy on the night of the win. The protest built across the seven months between the May 2025 contest in Basel and the EBU office handover in December.
| Date | Step |
|---|---|
| May 2024 | Nemo wins Eurovision 2024 in Malmö for Switzerland with The Code on 591 points |
| Through 2024–2025 | Nemo participates in conventional post-win duties — press appearances, the 2025 contest passing of hosting to Switzerland, Eurovision-adjacent events |
| May 2025 | Eurovision 2025 staged in Basel; Switzerland hosts as the holder; Nemo's role as outgoing winner is the most visible artist position at the contest |
| Summer–Autumn 2025 | Public statements from former Eurovision artists begin to accumulate; the open letter from 72 former Eurovision contestants over the EBU's handling of Israel's participation circulates through autumn 2025 |
| 11 December 2025 | Nemo physically returns the trophy to the EBU; the Associated Press carries the story the same day |
| 16 May 2026 | The Vienna 2026 final closes; Bulgaria wins by 173 points with the largest broadcaster boycott (five national broadcasters) since 1970 |
| Post-16 May 2026 | Charlie McGettigan publicly states he will also return his 1994 trophy |
What this signals for the 2027 outright market
For UK Eurovision bettors looking ahead to Sofia 2027, the December 2025 trophy return is more than a cultural-moment story. It is a structural signal that broadcaster, artist and former-winner activism around the contest is no longer fringe. Five broadcasters boycotted Vienna 2026. Seventy-two former contestants signed the autumn 2025 open letter. The 2024 winner returned the trophy. The 1994 winner says he will too. Each of those is a separate vector of pressure on the EBU heading into 2027.
Two market-relevant implications follow. First, the structural risk premium on any Israel-related 2027 outright price is now meaningfully wider than it was at this point last year. If Israel remains in the field, the cycle of protest-driven boycotts and artist withdrawals is likely to repeat — meaning the field itself becomes less predictable, the jury composition becomes more politically charged, and televote pools shift in less stable ways. Second, the precedent of a returning winner reduces the social cost for a 2027 winner to do the same if the contest's geopolitical posture has not changed by then. That tail risk is currently not priced into any UK book.
Bulgaria's Sofia hosting itself is also under different scrutiny than a host nation would have faced 18 months ago. The questions about whether national broadcasters will commit, whether competing artists will withdraw between the November 2026 national-final cycle and the May 2027 contest, and whether the 2026 cycle's 70-year-first will produce a 2027 follow-up are open questions the outright market has not yet absorbed. Best-priced ante-post lines on Sofia attendance and on Israel's 2027 participation should be checked weekly through autumn 2026; either is materially more uncertain than the standard EBU-confirmation cycle would suggest.
The single sentence to take away
From 1956 to December 2025 — 69 contests, 67 winning entries, hundreds of winning artists — not one winner ever returned their trophy in protest. Then Nemo did. Then Charlie McGettigan said he would too. The 70-year first is not in the act itself but in the social and political conditions that made two former winners, three decades apart, decide simultaneously that the trophy was no longer something they wanted to keep. That is the data point the 2027 market has not yet priced.
Related
- Nemo returns the Eurovision trophy to the EBU — the 11 December 2025 protest
- Eurovision 2026 Grand Final recap — Bulgaria 516, Israel 343, the 173-point margin
- Martin Green on the 2026 boycotts — “just a footnote”?
- Eurovision 2027 Sofia — outright odds, market signals, host-country tracker
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