Harry Kane deserved a Ballon d'Or. He probably didn't deserve this specific one, and the 100 journalists who gave it to him on Monday night at the London Palladium knew it.
The highlight packages won't dwell on this part. The Ballon d'Or has run for decades on one lazy, reliable rule of thumb: win the World Cup, lift the golden ball. Kane lost in the semifinal while Spain won the tournament. Lamine Yamal, the teenager who was part of that winning squad, finished third; Kylian Mbappé finished second. The electorate looked straight at an actual world champion and decided the man who went out to Argentina in the last four, then captained England to a 6-4 win over France in the third-place match, had the better season anyway.
They decided that because of the number, and the number is obscene. Kane scored 73 goals in 65 games for club and country, picked up a second Golden Shoe, took the Best Striker prize on the same night, and won a Bundesliga and DFB-Pokal double with Bayern. Jamie Carragher made the case before the vote: "Kane should win the Ballon d'Or and the reason is because he's scored 73 goals in a season and only Lionel Messi has scored more in a season... He also won the double with Bayern Munich and was part of an England team that got to the World Cup semi-finals." You can't wave that away. Nobody scores at that rate by accident.
The complaint is that this win quietly reduces Kane's whole career to a single enormous year. What he's actually lifted at the top end is thin. Bayern went out to PSG in the Champions League semifinals, so he still has no European Cup to his name, and England went out in the World Cup semifinal. Two of the three biggest team trophies in the sport ended in near-misses at the final hurdle, papered over by a pile of personal goals. He was the best individual footballer on earth this season, even while his teams kept losing the games that mattered most.
The voters handed him the award over a World Cup champion, and they did it with a decade of guilt in the room. Roughly ten years ago, back when he was a Spurs striker who'd just finished tenth in this vote, Kane said his aim was "to try and win competitions and win the Ballon d'Or." He's been underranked and overlooked for most of the stretch since, scoring relentlessly for teams that fall short. The men filling in ballots this year were grading 2025-26, but they were also clearing an account that had been open far too long.
The ceremony itself gave the whole thing a farcical edge. Hours before kick-off, the Ballon d'Or's own website published three separate articles naming Kane, Yamal and Mbappé as the winner. A prize that wants to be treated as football's supreme judgment of merit couldn't keep its own result off the internet until the envelope was opened.
Kane earned a Ballon d'Or. He spent a decade being too good for the sides around him, and this is the trophy that finally admits it. He just happened to collect it in the one year an actual World Cup winner was standing next to him on the shortlist, and the voters looked away.
