England captain, Bayern Munich striker and former Tottenham Hotspur talisman Harry Kane was awarded football’s most coveted individual prize on Monday 26 October.
Alexia Putellas, the 2025/26 UEFA Women’s Champions League Player of the Season and 2025 Player of the Finals in the UEFA Women’s Nations League, also won her third Ballon d’Or.
The 70th edition of the award was the first in its history to be held outside Paris, in honour of its first ever winner, Englishman Sir Stanley Mathews. Therefore, it was perfectly fitting that England captain Kane and London City Lionesses’ captain Putellas received their awards at the London Palladium Theatre.
Kane is only the fifth Englishman to ever win the award. France and Argentina have eight winners; Germany, the Netherlands, and Portugal have seven. After 1995, non-European players became eligible to win, but only if they played in Europe. From 2007 all players globally have been able to win the award.
The Ballon d’Or is a trophy which has become synonymous with controversy. Decided by a vote from journalists, the prize is, at its core, a popularity contest, and so it is especially rare in the world of social media that everyone will be content with the result.
Just this week, the Ballon d’Or divided supporters of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi by announcing their Ballon d’Or of All Time, with Messi fans raging at the decision to award Ronaldo the newly created prize (albeit with a staggering 75% of the vote).
In 2024, Real Madrid CF boycotted the ceremony after Brazilian winger Vinicius Junior missed out on the award to the then-Manchester City midfielder Rodri; only rescinding their boycott this year upon finding out that the star striker Kylian Mbappé had been shortlisted to win the prestigious prize.
Similarly, with the cancellation of the Ballon d’Or in 2020, many felt that striker Robert Lewandowski wrongly missed out on the prize, given his strong contribution to Bayern Munich’s treble. Lewandowski’s case certainly holds weight: his 64 goals and 9 assists in only 54 games were essential in Bayern’s successful season, where they won both the Bundesliga and the DFL Supercup. In a mock vote by the football magazine FourFourTwo, Lewandowski won the Ballon d’Or with 561 points, beating second-place Kevin De Bruyne by 441 points.
It perhaps comes with no surprise, therefore, that this year’s ceremony was also tinged with controversy, as many protested that 19-year-old Barcelona talent Lamine Yamal should have beaten Harry Kane to the prize. One such critic was in fact Yamal’s own uncle, Abdul Abdellaoui, who believed that the youngster should have received the coveted prize instead of the Young Talent of the Year award for the third consecutive year.
Furthermore, as reported on by the BBC, at 17:15 GMT, nearly three hours before the start of the ceremony, an article from the official Ballon d’Or website announced Harry Kane as the winner. This began to circulate online, before being removed by 17:40. Whilst similar articles were reportedly published on the website about Lamine Yamal and Kylian Mbappé, such a leak has marred the event.
Similarly, ex-Arsenal and Barcelona forward-turned-manager and pundit Thierry Henry, has received criticism over his hosting of the ceremony. Having joked with Lamine Yamal about winning the Young Talent of the Year award rather than the coveted Balon d’Or, Henry defended his statement, reaffirming his admiration for the young Spaniard and denying that he was “checking his ego”. Moreover, after admitting that he would have preferred his fellow Frenchman Mbappé to win the award, he has since added that Kane was a “worthy winner” of the prize.
Regardless of personal opinion, it is undoubtable that Kane has been a fantastic role model for many across the world. As the captain of the England national team, he led his side to their best finish on foreign soil this summer in Canada, Mexico and the USA in the World Cup. Running rampant in front of goal, netting 61 goals for Bayern Munich and 12 for England in the 2025/26 campaign, Kane secured a third consecutive Bundesliga Golden Boot, and became just the sixth player in Champions League history to reach 14 goals in a season. His six World Cup goals also took him beyond Gary Lineker’s ten, to become the most potent English player in front of goal in the quadrennial competition.
Kane arrived back in Germany on Tuesday 27 October to a guard of honour at training at Bayern Munich. He will be careful to balance his worthy celebration with training, though, as he looks to Saturday’s upcoming derby ‘Der Klassiker’ against Borussia Dortmund.