Harry Kane won the 2026 Ballon d'Or at the London Palladium on Monday 26 October, the first English winner since Michael Owen in 2001 and the first from a German club since Matthias Sammer in 1996. Kylian Mbappé was second and Lamine Yamal third. The jury went with the goals. Our data had him eighth of the 27 nominees we could rate.
How to read this: Scout52 Scores are from 2025/26 league matches only (no cups, no Champions League, no World Cup), with every player benchmarked against his own position in Europe's top five leagues. Lionel Messi, Sadio Mané and Quiñones played outside the top five, so they are not in the ranking. We re-scored every nominee on 27 October 2026 with the current version of our model: no composite changed and Scout52 Scores moved by 0.03 at most. The full method is in our ranking of the nominees.
Where Kane ranked in our model
Kane finished with a Scout52 Score of 8.55 as an Inside Forward. His Goal Threat of 9.8 is in the top 10% for his age group, and he scored 36 in the Bundesliga, top scorer for the third season running, on the way to 61 for Bayern and 73 for club and country. Where the model marked him down is the rest of an attacker's job: Chance Creation 7.1 and Ball Carry 7.0, against 9.6 and 9.9 for Lamine Yamal.
| Player | S52 | Goal Threat | Chance Creation | Ball Carry | Passing | Duels | Defensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michael OliseElite Attacking Midfielder · Bayern · model first | 9.14 | 9.9 | 9.7 | 9.5 | 8.6 | 5.7 | 0.8 |
| Lamine YamalElite Progressive Carrier · Barcelona · model second | 9.08 | 9.7 | 9.6 | 9.9 | 7.1 | 5.7 | 1.0 |
| Kylian MbappéElite Inside Forward · Real Madrid · model sixth | 8.69 | 9.5 | 8.9 | 9.2 | 9.0 | 3.9 | 0.2 |
| Harry KaneInside Forward · Bayern · model eighth | 8.55 | 9.8 | 7.1 | 7.0 | 7.4 | 7.6 | 5.5 |
Green = best of these players, red = lowest. Scores out of 10, 2025/26 league matches only, each player benchmarked against his own position in Europe's top five leagues.
The podium against the data
Each of the 100 jurors ranked ten players. Here is how the top three finished, next to where our model put them. All three of the jury's top three were in our model's top ten.
| Jury | Player | Our model (of 27) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Harry Kane | Eighth (8.55) |
| 2 | Kylian Mbappé | Sixth (8.69) |
| 3 | Lamine Yamal | Second (9.08) |
What the data saw that the vote didn't
Two players outscored Kane clearly on league data, and one of them shared his dressing room. Michael Olise (9.14) set up 19 Bundesliga goals and scored 15, and a large share of Bayern's attacks started with him and finished with Kane. Yamal (9.08) was half a point clear and won the World Cup and La Liga.
The other awards
- Kopa Trophy (best player under 21): Lamine Yamal
- Yashin Trophy (best goalkeeper): Unai Simón
- Gerd Müller Trophy (top scorer): Harry Kane
- Women's Ballon d'Or: Alexia Putellas
It is her third Ballon d'Or, after 2021 and 2022.
The goals won, and that is a fair way to vote
The jury is told to weigh trophies, decisive moments and the season as a whole, and Kane had all three: 73 goals, a league and cup double, and six goals at a World Cup where England reached the semi-finals. A model built only from league matches sees a brilliant finisher who does less elsewhere than the players around him in the ranking.
The Bottom Line
We'd have given it to Lamine Yamal, and we said so. But this is a fair result: Kane's 73 goals are the kind of season the award was made for, and it ends England's 25-year wait. On league data the best season of all belonged to his Bayern teammate, Michael Olise.
More on the 2026 Ballon d'Or: all 27 nominees ranked by data, how the vote works and every Ballon d'Or winner since 1956.
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