The 70th Ballon d’Or was presented at the London Palladium on Monday, October 26th, with England and Bayern Munich striker Harry Kane declared the winner, ahead of contenders Lamine Yamal and Kylian Mbappé.
The forward is the first English winner since Michael Owen in 2001, perfectly timed with this being the first ceremony held in the United Kingdom, a choice made to honor England’s Stanley Matthews, who won the first Ballon d’Or in 1956.
The England captain is the first Bayern Munich player to win the Ballon d’Or in 45 years, and before him, the club’s winners were all German and all came in a 12-year spell. Gerd Müller won in 1970, Franz Beckenbauer in 1972 and 1976, and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge in 1980 and 1981. Lothar Matthäus won in 1990, but he had left for Inter by the time of the award, and Robert Lewandowski was widely expected to win in 2020 before France Football cancelled that year’s award because of the pandemic. Kane is Bayern’s first foreign winner and the club’s fourth in total, with six awards between them.
Kane went into the ceremony as the bookmakers’ favorite, and his numbers explain why. He scored 73 goals in 65 games for club and country in the 2025/26 season, including 61 in 51 for Bayern. 36 of those came in 31 Bundesliga matches, which made him the league’s top scorer for the third season running since he arrived from Tottenham Hotspur in 2023.
Bayern won the Bundesliga and the DFB-Pokal and also became the first Englishman named Germany’s player of the year. He came close in the two biggest competitions, scoring 14 Champions League goals, one behind Kylian Mbappé in the ranking chart, as Bayern reached the semifinals before Paris Saint-Germain ended their run, winning a 5-4 first leg in Paris on the way to retaining the trophy.
At the World Cup, Kane scored six goals with one assist as England reached the last four, where they lost the semifinal to Argentina, then beat France 6-4 in the third-place match with Kane captaining the side throughout.
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