Football’s perennial bridesmaid finally catches the bouquet

“Personally, I’ve done well, but I want to be Ronaldo, Messi.” 

That was Harry Kane talking to his then Tottenham manager Jose Mourinho in the 2019-20 season, seen by the world through the Amazon Prime documentary series ‘All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur’. 

Kane was already an established name in English football by then, having won many Golden Boots, but there was no team silverware in his trophy cabinet.

It was a brave thing to say out loud. It was also the sort of line that made you wince a little, the way you do when a mate announces he is running a marathon with no training.

Winning a Ballon d’Or the way those two did, season after season, has never looked further out of reach than it does now. Football has drifted away from the lone superstar. Luis Enrique built a PSG that conquered Europe twice without hanging the whole thing on one man’s shoulders. Spain lifted this summer’s World Cup with their teenage star largely quiet, and a midfielder named Rodri walked off with the Golden Ball. The era of the one-man show looked finished.

And yet here we are. Harry Kane, the lad from Chingford who simply refused to go away, has won the Ballon d’Or – a line only a select group of elite footballers can put on their tombstone. 

The boy who was shown the door at eight

Every great story needs a muddy park, and Kane’s was Ridgeway Park in Chingford, backing onto the garden of his family home. His dad went in goal while his brother Charlie, four years older, played one-on-one against him for hours. Playing against bigger lads, he has said, made him compete harder.

Then, aged eight, came the first big knock. Arsenal let him go. His father put an arm round his shoulders on the walk to the park and told him not to worry, they would just work harder and find another club. No tantrums, no blame. Kane went back to Ridgeway Rovers, was turned down by Tottenham after a trial. But after he shone against them in a Watford shirt, they changed their minds. He has joked that the white kit simply fit him better.

At eleven he was at the opening of David Beckham’s academy in Greenwich, grinning beneath Beckham’s shoulder in a photograph. Next to him stood a girl called Katie, a classmate who would one day become his wife. You could not write a more English fairy tale even if you tried.

Four loans and a seat behind Adebayor

Nobody saw a Ballon d’Or winner coming. A teacher who coached him at Chingford Foundation School remembers a quiet, fiercely competitive boy who trained like a grown-up. But the leap from that boy to the best player on earth was not obvious to anyone, least of all the people watching him in the lower leagues.

The loans came thick and fast: Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich City and Leicester City. His professional breakthrough in 2014-15 was not the smooth coronation people now assume. Kane started that season behind Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado in the pecking order.

When he was not even named on the bench for a game against West Brom, he asked Mauricio Pochettino what he needed to do to get a chance. He got it, and then two goals against Chelsea and two in a North London derby changed everything.

From there it was relentless. Premier League Golden Boots in 2015-16 and 2016-17, a World Cup Golden Boot in 2018 as England captain, and 56 goals in the calendar year of 2017 that had people muttering about “Ronaldo numbers”. He scored 280 goals in 435 games for Spurs. The only thing missing was a medal to hang round his neck.

The world’s most decorated nearly man

That missing medal became a running gag. Spurs lost a Champions League final and a League Cup final.

England lost the Euro 2020 final on penalties, then Kane skied a spot-kick against France in the 2022 World Cup quarterfinal, and England lost the Euro 2024 final to Spain. Every near miss felt like another page in a book nobody wanted to write.

Fans around the world needed no encouragement. If your club was trophyless, you could always point at Kane and feel better about yourself. “Trophyless Kane” became a meme, then a punchline, then a curse that supposedly followed him wherever he went. The cruelest part is that he was never the problem. Strikers do not defend corners or save penalties.

The curse that wasn’t, until it was lifted

In August 2023, Kane shocked everyone when he left Tottenham for Bayern Munich. He was just 47 goals short of Alan Shearer’s Premier League record at the time, which tells you what he was prepared to give up. He wanted team silverware. Bayern had won 11 straight Bundesliga titles and looked like the safest bet in football.

Then it all went wrong. Bayer Leverkusen went an entire league season unbeaten, snapped Bayern’s run, and Bayern finished third, behind Stuttgart as well. Pundits and fans did not think twice. Of course Bayern had not won it, the headlines read, they had signed Harry Kane. The “Kane curse” was now a Bundesliga problem too.

He had scored 36 league goals, collected the Golden Boot and netted 44 across all competitions. None of it mattered to the trolls. Under new manager Vincent Kompany, Bayern reclaimed the title in 2024-25.

On May 4, 2025, Leverkusen drew 2-2 at Freiburg and Bayern were champions. Kane, 31, had his first trophy. His old Tottenham and England teammate Eric Dier won his first on the same day. Kane lifted the Meisterschale on May 10 and said afterwards that a weight had come off his shoulders.

The season that shut everybody up

Unburdened, Kane really hit his stride last season, scoring 61 goals in 51 matches for Bayern, the most any Bayern player has ever scored in a single campaign. Adding 12 for England made it 73 goals in 65 games. Only Messi’s 82 in 2011-12 has ever been higher from a top-five-league player.

He was 19 goals clear of anyone else in Europe’s top five leagues and matched Cristiano Ronaldo’s 61 for Real Madrid in 2014-15. He scored 36 in the Bundesliga, 17 more than the next man. He scored 14 in the Champions League, one shy of Mbappe, and took Bayern to the semifinals. He scored 10 in the German Cup, including a hat-trick in the 3-0 final win over Stuttgart, and the Bavarians won the double.

At the World Cup, he captained England to third place, the best finish in 60 years. His six goals took him past Gary Lineker as England’s leading scorer at World Cups. He became the first England man to score at five different major tournaments. Even a bad-tempered rival would call that a hell of a year. 

The gentleman and the stump speakers

The funny thing about this year’s Ballon d’Or race is how loud it was. Mbappe and Yamal both went on a full media blitz, with at least two major interviews apiece in the weeks before voting closed, and neither exactly played hard to get. 

Mbappe said: “My idea of the Ballon d’Or comes from the Messi and Ronaldo era - you don’t give it to ordinary players, you give it to players who are different.” 

Yamal followed with: “I think the Ballon d’Or should go to the best player in the world, period. Not to a player who’s scored 80 goals, because when you score 80 goals, you get the ‘top scorer’ award for that. These are very different things that people aren’t understanding.”

Neither of them mentioned Kane by name. They did not have to. Read between the lines and both quotes sound like digs at the man who led the betting. Mbappe talked about “ordinary players” and “players who are different”, and if there was one candidate on the shortlist who had never been sold as glamorous, it was the 33-year-old who had spent his career being polite on camera and cutting in front of nobody. 

Yamal’s jab was even less subtle, because the only player anywhere near 80 goals last season was Kane, who finished on 73 in 65 games, a whisker short of the figure he waved away as a mere “top scorer” statistic. Whether they meant it or not, it landed like a pointed remark at a dinner party.

Real Madrid and Barcelona were both busy campaigning for their boys, and Mourinho, now in the Real Madrid dugout, lent his weight to Mbappe’s argument. Messi’s Argentina teammates were pushing for a ninth, and those around PSG were happy to say a Champions League winner should get it. The whole circus felt like a general election in which every candidate had a spin doctor and a bus.

Kane, meanwhile, stayed in his lane. Asked about the noise, he said everyone was entitled to do what they wanted, and he stuck to the line that it was simply not his personality to talk about himself that way. 

“I’ve never liked to talk about myself too much,” he told Marca, adding only that it had been the best season of his life and that 73 goals spoke for itself. 

His manager at Bayern, Vincent Kompany, was just as understated, saying he did not have the Ballon d’Or in his mind every day and cared more about winning titles. It was almost comically English. The favourite went about his business like a man queueing for a bus.

That restraint is what made the contrast so sharp. In a campaign where everyone else seemed to be shouting about their own greatness, the one man with the numbers to shout was the one who stayed quiet. It also said something about the winner that the dig never got a reply.

He did not clap back, did not retweet a stat, and did not point out that the man who had waved away 80 goals had spent the autumn making a case for himself.

And when it was over, he did not crow. The same night, he posted: “Work hard in silence. Let success be your noise.”

The longest wait in the West End

Nine years ago, Kane stood at the back of the London Palladium after The Best FIFA Football Awards, staring at the winners on stage. He had finished 24th in the vote that night. On October 26, in the same theatre, it was his turn.

The evening was a circus. The ceremony started 45 minutes late, the official website mistakenly published winner profiles for Kane, Mbappe and Yamal and deleted them, and the booing from the crowd during the long breaks was relentless. Brazil’s Ronaldo opened the envelope at 10.44 PM local time and the whole theatre erupted. Kane put his hands to his face, froze for a second, then hugged his Bayern teammates Dayot Upamecano, Lennart Karl, Luis Diaz and Michael Olise.

“Wow, wow, wow,” he said on stage, before thanking Tottenham, his parents, his wife, and even Mourinho, the man who had once told him that England’s stars needed to build their status.

He cried, he croaked, he said it was something they could celebrate together, as a team. Then he walked off the stage looking a little shy, keen to let everyone get on with the night.

He became the first Bayern player to win since Karl-Heinz Rummenigge in 1981 and the fifth Englishman, after Stanley Matthews, Bobby Charlton, Kevin Keegan and Michael Owen. England’s 25 years’ wait for its fifth Ballon d’Or winner ended the first time the ceremony took place in London.

England manager Thomas Tuchel said he was delighted, Prince William called him a brilliant captain, and the Wembley arches turned gold.

What the golden ball is really worth

“Not many people would have thought it, and maybe even I wouldn’t have thought I’d be this far,” Kane told DAZN. “I was never the person that people thought was going to be the superstar like some of the guys now.”

That is the heart of it. Kane never had a Messi-sized myth. He had work, patience, and a refusal to be told no. Five of the last 20 Ballon d’Or winners have gone to players without a World Cup, Champions League or European Championship, and he is the latest.

At 33, he has proved consistency can go all the way, even in an era obsessed with loud individuals. He has started this season from where he had left off the last one, scoring 16 goals in 16 matches for club and country.

He has talked about it himself, in his own way. In October 2022, in his debut appearance on CBeebies Bedtime Stories, Kane read The Lion Inside and said: “We all feel like that little mouse sometimes, looking for our roars. But it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, we all have a lion inside.”

Harry Kane never needed to roar. He just kept turning up until the whole world heard it anyway.