After a night of delays, confusion and a long, long wait, Harry Kane finally strode on to the stage at the London Palladium at 10.51pm to receive the Ballon d’Or. It has been 12 years since Kane burst into the national consciousness as an unassuming 21-year-old with an eye for goal. The extraordinary, self-willed career that followed may not have delivered the most coveted team trophies, but as Kane turned the golden orb in his fingers, he finally held football’s ultimate individual crown.
Kane is only the fifth Englishman to win the prize after Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Bobby Charlton, Kevin Keegan and Michael Owen. It is 25 years since Owen’s award and 70 years since Matthews won the inaugural Ballon d’Or, the serendipitous anniversary that brought this ceremony from Paris to Kane’s hometown.
It had been a tense wait over recent weeks as 100 journalists around the world decided the best player of the 2025/26 season. Kylian Mbappe and Lamine Yamal turned on the PR campaigns in an effort to woo swing voters: Mbappe played to the African bloc while Yamal tried to directly undermine Kane’s candidacy, hinting he lacked the “magic” of a true winner.
On the night there was some controversy too, when the Ballon d’Or’s official website published separate articles proclaiming all three favourites had won, hours before the ceremony began. Someone at head office presumably had a heart attack and swiftly deleted them, but not before the internet had screenshotted receipts.
Outside the Palladium there was chaos, as every surrounding street was choked with people poking phones over security barriers to get a digital glimpse of their favourite players. Inside the theatre, an announcement was made of a half-an-hour delay which turned into an hour. A Frenchman named Charlie came out to pump up the audience, calling for “massive energy tonight”, like a beleaguered manager talking to a dressing room he’d long since lost.
When the show finally began, Spain’s Alexia Putellas won her third Ballon d’Or, and Bukayo Saka was recognised for his charity work. Yamal was named the world’s best young player, but he finished behind Kane for the main men’s prize.
No doubt the result will set off sirens of outrage on social media among faceless football accounts, that this was all a conspiracy against Barcelona or Real Madrid, those famously downtrodden institutions. And sure, Yamal and Mbappe will one day be worthy winners themselves.
But amid the heated debate around this year’s award, there was a risk of overthinking it. Kane scored an absurd 73 goals in 64 games, a tally achieved only once before in a top European league, by Lionel Messi, who scored 82 in 2011/12. Cristiano Ronaldo’s best campaign was 69 goals in 69 games, and nobody else has come close.
Kane scored 36 Bundesliga goals despite starting only 25 games. He scored in every round of the German Cup including a hat-trick in the final. He scored in every Champions League knockout game he played, against both Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. He scored six goals in seven World Cup games, including those crucial strikes against Panama, DR Congo and Mexico to keep England’s tournament on track.
Turn the numbers on their head, and had Mbappe scored 73 goals, there would have been no question about the winner here.
Perhaps Kane is a victim of his own reluctance to play the publicity game. Perhaps it is a reflection of a talent which is altogether harder to appreciate than his rivals. His finishing is obvious, but then there’s his movement, the use of his body as a shield, the faintest touches that open a shooting lane only he knew existed. Kane may not have the dribbling gifts of Mbappe or Yamal, but he is a goalscoring genius.
In some ways, any individual award increasingly jars with modern football, a complex game of carefully choreographed patterns and hyper-tuned systems. The best team in the world are PSG and this is their narrative arc: they signed Lionel Messi, Mbappe and Neymar and kept losing; then they sold them, built a team who ran for each other and conquered Europe, twice. Football has arguably never been more collaborative.
But perhaps that is all the more reason to appreciate the Ballon d’Or, a gaudy event of inflated egos and bad tuxedos, but one which remains a celebration of artistry in an increasingly scientific field. Yamal may not appreciate it, but Kane’s art is finishing and this Ballon d’Or is, above all, a monument to his craft.
Kane is something of a rebel figure in that sense, someone not born into this world of gilded superstars but who turned himself into one by sheer force of will. Mbappe and Yamal were World Cup winners by 19 years old, around the same age as Kane was cycling through loan moves to Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich and Leicester. They rocketed to stardom while Kane took the Megabus.
Kyle Walker recently described the teenaged Kane as “overweight” and “not very mobile”. Fellow Spurs academy graduate Adam Smith said last month: “I didn’t think he would go to this level, I don’t think anyone thought he would.”
But every coach, teammate and loan manager said the same few things about Kane: that his finishing was peerless, that he was uniquely driven, that he absorbed information and trained relentlessly to improve every aspect of his game. “Even as a 14-year-old, he was always a little bit different,” Smith said. “You know how a lot of youngsters would just follow each other? He’d always do his own thing. He had the mental edge on a lot of players.”
Kane’s self-improvement was not Jake Humphrey chugging Huel at 5am while reading Steve Jobs quotes, but in the intelligent, consistent application to his task. It was in the details, training himself to shoot in the realistic chaos of match conditions, balls bouncing, tight spaces, defenders everywhere. He still trains with mannequins who act as opponents in his periphery.
And as twee as it might sound, he is the very best of English men, a picture of wholesome masculinity. He says he wants to play until he’s 40, and honestly, who’d bet against him? He says he wants to be a placekicker in the NFL, and if it was anyone else you’d laugh. But it’s Kane, and he’ll probably be kicking field goals in 10 years’ time. He is the sort of man who will spend his retirement doing crosswords while his 17th attempt at olive-infused sourdough bakes in the oven.
He has got here without selling himself to every marketing offer. He has done it all with a lateral lisp that has been ridiculed. His wife Kate has received untold online abuse, and she was here by his side as his career reached its personal pinnacle. “We’re in this together,” Kane said on stage. “I know this wouldn’t be possible without you.”
Watching on, Mbappe applauded with a polite smile. This was meant to be the era of Mbappe v Haaland, and it would have seemed bizarre when he won the 2018 World Cup, aged 19, that he would not have won this award eight years later. Messi’s reign extended longer than anyone imagined and Mbappe is running out of road before the Yamal era begins.
But this was not the year for either. Perhaps this has been Kane’s greatest achievement of all, that his extraordinary goalscoring became so ordinary that his right to win the Ballon d’Or was questioned.
It has been a career spent proving people wrong, from the Arsenal coaches who rejected him as an eight-year-old, to the rival fans who labelled him a one-season wonder or mocked his lack of trophies. He might finally feel vindicated and satisfied by this night. But no doubt Kane collected more fuel here, from anyone who thought he didn’t deserve this stage.