Picture the scene. Three candidates, an electorate of exactly 100 journalists, a media blitz that would make a campaign manager weep with pride, and a ballot that closed on September 28.
This is not a general election. It is the race for the 2026 Ballon d’Or, and it has produced more stump speeches than a by-election and more backstabbing than a Roy family board meeting in the HBO series Succession.
The old kings have left the room, the heirs are circling, and we have so far been spared the baby-kissing photo ops, though give Kylian Mbappe time.
The winner will be named at the London Palladium on Monday, October 26, at the 70th edition and the first held outside Paris. It is quite a journey for a trophy that once cared so little about the planet’s best footballers that it did not let them in.
The Ballon d’Or began life as a way to sell magazines. France Football launched it in 1956 and handed it out at the end of the calendar year, so the pages would stay full when frozen pitches wiped out fixtures. Jacques Ferran, one of its founding fathers, admitted decades later that he never imagined the impact it would have. In his words, it was just another trophy at first.
Sixteen European journalists did the voting. The inaugural winner was Stanley Matthews, who was 41 and had the cheek to beat Alfredo Di Stefano and Raymond Kopa to it. There was no ceremony, as Matthews was just handed a compact version of the trophy in Blackpool’s clubhouse. It was a long way from the red carpets and fan zones of today.
Early winners treated the prize with a shrug that would give a modern agent heart palpitations. Luis Suarez collected his in 1960 at an ordinary league game and went home with it, and no big dinner followed. Bobby Charlton learned he had won in 1966 from a radio bulletin on the coach back from a Boxing Day defeat to Sheffield United. He was in no mood to celebrate.
Florian Albert’s 1967 ceremony took place in his kitchen, and his wife Iren was the only spectator. Allan Simonsen found out in 1977 while queuing for a grilled sausage, then swapped the barbecue for bubbly. Igor Belanov beat Gary Lineker to the 1986 prize, replaced the display case twice from overuse, and later took the trophy to Ukrainian soldiers to give them a few minutes away from the war.
Michael Owen’s story is the best known. As The Athletic recounted in a piece published in September 2025, his manager Gerard Houllier delivered the news of his 2001 triumph by phone, and the 22-year-old did not exactly throw a party. He has since told ESPN his first instinct was to ask Houllier what the thing even was. He only grasped its weight after joining Real Madrid, where it began to feel like a knighthood.
The charm of those stories hides an uncomfortable truth. From 1956 until 1994, only European players could win, and the award was literally known as the European Footballer of the Year. From 1995, it opened to any nationality at a European club, and only in 2007 did it go truly global.
That meant Pele and Diego Maradona were never eligible. In 1963, Lev Yashin became the only goalkeeper to win it, famously insisting he was not even the best keeper around, while Pele was busy winning the Copa Libertadores and the Intercontinental Cup. France Football eventually tried to atone. Maradona received an honorary Ballon d’Or in 1995, Pele got an honorary prize from FIFA in 2013, and a 2016 retrospective re-evaluation handed Pele seven imaginary trophies. The official list never changed, which is the footballing equivalent of a sorry card.
George Weah, who became the first non-European winner in 1995, remains Africa’s only recipient. He reportedly whispered that he thought he was going to die when his name was read out, and promised to send out cassettes of the moment filmed on a camcorder.
The restrictions explain a lot of the sibling awards. FIFA created its World Player of the Year in 1991 largely because the Ballon d’Or ignored the rest of the world. The two prizes merged into the FIFA Ballon d’Or from 2010 to 2015, then split again in 2016. UEFA, meanwhile, launched its own European award in 2011, with Michel Platini pining for the simplicity of one journalist per nation. And it ran until Erling Haaland collected the last one in 2023.
Then came Twitter, and with it two men who turned a trophy into a scoreboard. Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo won 13 of the 15 awards from 2008 to 2023. Pascal Ferre, France Football’s editor at the time, claimed in 2021 that Ronaldo wanted to retire with more than Messi. Ronaldo denied saying it. Neymar left Barcelona in 2017 partly because he calculated that winning in Messi’s shadow was impossible.
Others took a dimmer view. Arsene Wenger said he had seen careers wrecked by obsession with individual awards, and Pep Guardiola called the whole dream ridiculous. Franck Ribery is still seething over missing out in 2013, a year in which he lifted five trophies with Bayern Munich.
Luka Modric broke the duopoly in 2018 and cried like a child. Messi’s eighth in 2023, after the World Cup, felt to many like a coronation too far.
By 2024, the prize had become a matter of state. Rodri beat Vinicius Junior by 41 votes, and as word spread on the day of the ceremony, Real Madrid ordered a club-wide boycott. Carlo Ancelotti did not collect his coach award, and nobody showed up to take the club of the year prize.
Rodri arrived on crutches, was helped to the stage by Ruben Dias, and delivered a speech that was classier than the protest it followed. He became the first Spanish man to win since Luis Suarez in 1960, and his team was not shy about pushing his candidacy through interviews with the world’s media.
Even then, the real tell was the outrage. Rio Ferdinand famously chanted “Ballon d’Or” over and over while commentating on the 2024 Champions League final. Madrid fans did the same at the Bernabeu months later.
Ousmane Dembele won in 2025, on September 22 at the Theatre du Chatelet, and wept while hugging his mother. He took 73 of the 100 first-place votes, which in a points system that pays 15 for first and 12 for second, amounted to a landslide. The ceremony drew about 2.5 million live viewers in France, and Dembele added nearly a million Instagram followers in two days.
Yet even that supposedly wholesome victory carried a whiff of lobbying. GQ reported that an Australian journalist, Neal Gardner, was emailed by a company offering money for a social media campaign boosting Dembele’s candidacy. The company later blamed a rogue intern. That excuse has roughly the credibility of a dog eating ones homework.
That brings us to this autumn, where subtlety has left the building. Mbappe, Lamine Yamal and Kane have each given at least two major interviews on their chances, and a representative of a previous winner told ESPN the tone of the whole drive had become unedifying.
The theory in the marketing world is that if you are a serious contender and cannot be bothered to talk about the prize, the voters may wonder whether you even want it. In 2026, silence is apparently a policy position.
Mbappe has run the most unapologetic campaign. He told France Football, “You do not give the Ballon d’Or to ordinary players”, a line that won him few friends. His manifesto is not short of numbers: 10 goals to win a second World Cup Golden Boot, 22 goals to become the all-time top-scorer of the tournament, and 42 goals in 44 games for Real Madrid, attaining the top scorer’s spot in LaLiga and the Champions League.
The small print is less flattering. France lost to Spain in the semifinals and then lost 6-4 to England in the third-place play-off, and Real Madrid’s season was patchy, with Xabi Alonso’s brief reign ending badly. Pascal Ferre, who ran France Football from 1996 to 2023, told Marca he considered Mbappe’s campaign far superior to Yamal’s but doubted it would move a single juror, since a Ballon d’Or is earned and not demanded.
He added that he would not have voted for the Frenchman himself, because Mbappe was one of the few nominees without a club title.
Yamal said he would not beg for the prize, then went on a media run of his own. He suggested only he and Mbappe are the best in the world and took a swipe at anyone who simply scores 80 goals, widely read as a dig at Kane.
His case is far from flimsy. He is still only 19 and was involved in 41 goals for Barcelona, with 24 goals and 17 assists, and he is a LaLiga champion and a World Cup winner with Spain. The flaw in his ballot is that he managed just one goal involvement at the World Cup, and the campaign itself did not go down well at home, where critics pointed out that Messi, Iniesta and Xavi never proclaimed themselves the best on earth.
Kane is the bookmakers’ heavy favourite, having scored 61 goals in 51 games for Bayern, won the Bundesliga by 16 points, collected the Golden Shoe and captained England to a World Cup 3rd place. He is the least brazen of the three.
Asked about his rivals, he said everyone is entitled to do what they want and that the Ballon d’Or has grown mainly because of social media and all the noise. He then added that it is simply not his personality to talk about himself that way, and that it makes him prouder when teammates and former players do it for him.
Of course, he also made his desire to win perfectly clear.
That is the political art of the humble brag, and it comes with a long-shot angle: no Englishman has won since Michael Owen in 2001, and Kane has no Champions League or World Cup medal to wave about.
The rest of the field has been busy too. Messi is nominated for the first time since 2023 after taking Argentina to the World Cup final, where he scored eight goals, only for Ferran Torres, now at PSG, to score the extra-time winner for Spain in the final. Add 52 goal involvements in 30 games for Inter Miami and you have the sentimental candidate, though MLS carries little weight with voters.
Rodri, Spain’s captain, won the World Cup Golden Ball ahead of Messi’s Silver Ball and Mbappe’s Bronze Ball, and he is back on the list two years after winning the prize himself.
Speaking on COPE’s El Partidazo, he named six Spanish players he believes deserve it: Cucurella, Cubarsi, Ruiz, Yamal, Torres and himself. He backed each with a case of his own, from Torres’s decisive goal in the final to Ruiz’s trophy haul, and left Kane, Mbappe and Messi off his ticket entirely.
Ruiz needs little help on that front. The PSG midfielder is the only nominee to have won both the Champions League and the World Cup, and he has said himself that on trophies, nobody has done better than him.
Haaland and Vitinha remain on the list, as does Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the PSG winger whom the defending champion Dembele named in his own top three, alongside Kane and Mbappe. Dembele left himself out of that top three, which is a more modest manifesto than anyone else on the trail has offered. PSG, back-to-back Champions League winners, have 10 nominees, a sort of one-club coalition government.
Not content with a real election, the Ballon d’Or organisers launched a second one. The BOAT, or Ballon d’Or of All Time, is a fan vote costing one euro per ballot with no limit on repeat votes. It features only players who have won at least twice: Messi, Ronaldo, Ronaldo Nazario, Marco van Basten, Michel Platini, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Kevin Keegan, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff and Di Stefano. Fans vote for individual winning seasons, which splits Messi’s support eight ways. Predictably, Ronaldo’s 2008 season sat on around 75 per cent while Messi’s best years trailed on single figures.
Within days, France Football felt the need to clarify that the BOAT is not a revival of the Super Ballon d’Or, that no trophy is involved, and that it is simply a public vote celebrating fans’ passion. This landed days before the ceremony and, with voting open until October 27, a day after it. It dragged the Messi and Ronaldo rivalry into a gala that neither is contesting this year, since Ronaldo is not even on the shortlist. If you wanted a pay-per-view GOAT debate, the Ballon d’Or has finally monetised the ballot.
Strip away the noise and Monday night offers three routes into the record books, each with a catch. Kane would win without a Champions League medal or a World Cup, a feat managed in a World Cup year only by Hristo Stoichkov in 1994 and Messi in 2010. Yamal would become the youngest winner in the prize’s history at 19, after a World Cup in which he barely troubled the scoresheet. Mbappe would be the first winner since Ronaldo in 2013 to take it without a single trophy, which is exactly the argument Pascal Ferre made against him.
Whichever way it goes, it will be a first. The Ballon d’Or will leave Paris for the first time in its 70 years, and the first winner announced on foreign soil will be handed a trophy that once could not be won by Pele, Maradona or more than half the planet. Matthews got his in a Blackpool clubhouse. Someone gets theirs at the London Palladium. The campaign trail ends there, and only one candidate gets to say the slogans worked.