Harry Kane ends England's 25-year Ballon d'Or wait with 73 goals

73.

That is how many goals Harry Kane scored for Bayern Munich and England this season. On Monday night it won him the Ballon d'Or, the biggest individual prize in football, at a ceremony in London.

Kane is the first English player to win it in 25 years. The last one was Michael Owen, back in 2001.

The award beat Kylian Mbappe of Real Madrid and Lamine Yamal of Barcelona into second and third place. It also closed a joke that followed Kane for a decade, that he is the best striker alive who somehow wins nothing.

Why did the Ballon d'Or leave Paris for the first time in 70 years?

This was the 70th Ballon d'Or. Every single one before it was handed out in Paris, where France Football, the magazine that created the award, is based.

This year the ceremony moved to the London Palladium. The reason was Stanley Matthews, the first man ever to win the Ballon d'Or, in 1956. Organisers chose London to mark him.

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Matthews played for Blackpool. Seventy years after his win, an Englishman lifted the trophy again, in the city the award itself finally visited.

How many English players have won the Ballon d'Or before Kane?

Four, before Monday night. Kane makes five in 70 years.

That table is the full English record, start to finish. Nobody else had held the award between Owen and Kane for 25 years.

Why did people say Kane would never win this?

For most of his career, Kane scored for fun but left major finals empty handed. He lost a Premier League title race, two domestic cup finals and a Euro 2020 final with England, all without a trophy to show for the goals.

A year ago the mockery turned into an actual ranking. In October 2025, Kane finished 13th in that year's Ballon d'Or vote. His own England manager, Thomas Tuchel, said it straight out: "Harry is a true team player, and he stands out with what he does, so he should be higher than 13th for sure."

That 13th-place finish is the gap Kane closed in twelve months.

What did Kane actually do this season to win it?

He scored 73 goals in 65 games for Bayern Munich and England. Bayern won the Bundesliga, the DFB-Pokal and the German Supercup along the way.

Photo: Bryan Berlin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

At the World Cup in North America, Kane captained England to the semifinals, scoring six goals in seven games before Argentina knocked them out. Lionel Messi's Argentina went on to end England's run, which made beating Messi's old record somewhere else in the same season feel pointed.

Kane reached 20 goal contributions, goals plus assists, faster than any player in Ballon d'Or history except one. Messi set that mark in 749 minutes for Barcelona in 2011. Kane got there in 742 minutes, this season.

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He also becomes only the fourth Bayern Munich player ever to win the Ballon d'Or, after Gerd Muller, Franz Beckenbauer and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge.

Who else won an award on the night?

The women's Ballon d'Or Feminin went to Alexia Putellas, now at London City Lionesses, for a third time. Her last win came before a torn ACL kept her out of the game for close to a year, so Monday was a comeback too, just a different one to Kane's.

What are people saying about Kane's win?

Reaction split into two clear camps. One side pointed out that Kane is still trophyless with England at senior level, so the individual award does not erase that gap. The other side said a 25-year wait and 73 goals settle the argument on their own.

Both camps agree on one thing. By the morning after, Kane and the Ballon d'Or were the two biggest trending topics in the United Kingdom and in South Africa, a sign the story reached far past England's own fans.

It is the same kind of break from an old pattern that Formula One is chasing with its plan to race in Africa for the first time in decades, after 30 years away from the continent. Traditions that hold for 70 years rarely move. When they do, people notice.

Kane's old club, Tottenham, still plays in a Premier League that spent this year dealing with Manchester City's guilty verdict on financial charges, a reminder of how much noise English football generates even when Kane is 800 miles away in Munich. And the World Cup run that built his case ended against the same Argentina team that gave Lionel Messi his last international send-off months earlier, two Ballon d'Or stories meeting on the same pitch.

Kane spent ten years hearing that the medals never came. On the one night the world's oldest football award finally left France, an Englishman walked up to collect it, holding a number, 73, that the mockery never saw coming.