The 70th Ballon d'Or is presented in London on Monday. Kylian Mbappé arrives with the World Cup Golden Boot, the all-time World Cup scoring record and top-scorer honours in La Liga and the Champions League — but no trophy. Harry Kane and Lamine Yamal arrive with the silverware.
Published 24 October 2026 · 15:09 GMT
The 70th Ballon d'Or is presented in London on Monday. Kylian Mbappé arrives with the World Cup Golden Boot, the all-time World Cup scoring record and top-scorer honours in La Liga and the Champions League — but no trophy. Harry Kane and Lamine Yamal arrive with the silverware. The 70th Ballon d'Or ceremony takes place at the London Palladium on Monday, 26 October 2026, hosted by Kate Scott and Thierry Henry, the first time the gala has been held outside Paris.
The 70th Ballon d'Or will be presented at the London Palladium on Monday, 26 October 2026, voted for by journalists with voting closed on 28 September; Mbappé's scoring numbers — 42 goals in 44 Real Madrid appearances, La Liga top scorer with 25, Champions League top scorer with 15, World Cup Golden Boot with 10 goals and the all-time World Cup record of 22 — are not contested, and neither are the trophy cases of Kane and Yamal.
Whether individual scoring records should outweigh team trophies. Mbappé, his manager José Mourinho and backers such as Emmanuel Adebayor argue the player, not the team, is announced; the bookmakers and much of the Western press argue Kane's combination of 73 goals and a Bundesliga title, or Yamal's World Cup and La Liga double, should prevail.
Who won, how the jury weighed individual records against collective titles, whether unconfirmed reports that Real Madrid believe Mbappé has won have any basis, and how wide the winning margin will be when the full rankings are published.
On Monday evening, the 70th Ballon d'Or will be handed out at the London Palladium, the first time in the award's history that the ceremony leaves Paris. Kate Scott and Thierry Henry will host, the show begins at 8pm local time, and the winner will be a man whose season has already been argued over for months: Kylian Mbappé, Harry Kane or Lamine Yamal, the three names at the head of every shortlist. The award, run by France Football with UEFA, is voted for entirely by journalists, and voting closed on 28 September, so the envelope already contains a decision — only the announcement is still to come.
Mbappé has campaigned for it openly, which is itself part of the story. "Who am I voting for? Myself," he said last month, after a summer in which he became the all-time top scorer in World Cup history. He is not the bookmakers' favourite and he did not lift a trophy last season, for club or country. His case is that the numbers, and the history inside them, should be enough anyway.
The individual record is not in dispute. Mbappé scored 42 goals in 44 appearances for Real Madrid last season, finishing as La Liga's top scorer with 25 goals and as the Champions League's leading marksman with 15. At the 2026 World Cup in North America he won the Golden Boot for the second successive tournament, with 10 goals, and in doing so passed Lionel Messi to become the all-time leading scorer in World Cup history, with 22 goals against Messi's 21 and Miroslav Klose's 16.
The team record is equally clear, and it cuts the other way. Real Madrid finished second in La Liga behind Barcelona and were knocked out of the Champions League by Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals, ending a second straight season without a major trophy. France finished fourth at the World Cup, losing the semi-final to Spain and the third-place play-off to England. Mbappé's two main rivals both have what he lacks: Yamal won the World Cup with Spain and La Liga with Barcelona, and Kane won the Bundesliga with Bayern while scoring 73 goals for club and country across the season. This is Mbappé's ninth nomination; his best finish so far is third, in 2023.
The winner is unknown, and so is the reasoning that produced him. The jury's criteria are published — individual performances and decisiveness, collective performances and titles won, and class and fair play — but how each voter weighed a record-breaking scoring season against a trophy-less one will only be visible in the result itself. Reports in the days before the ceremony that Real Madrid believe Mbappé has already won are unconfirmed: they rest on a claim attributed to one journalist, and neither France Football nor the organisers have confirmed any outcome.
Nor do we know how much weight the jury gave to the World Cup at all. The tournament fell inside the judging window, which is why a summer competition is deciding an award presented in October, but whether voters treated Spain's triumph as Yamal's credential or Mbappé's Golden Boot as his remains a matter of reading the same summer two ways. The ceremony will settle the name; the argument about the criteria will outlive it.
The Ballon d'Or has, for a decade, gone to a player holding at least one trophy from the season in question. Ousmane Dembélé, the reigning winner, led Paris Saint-Germain to their first Champions League title; Rodri, the 2024 winner, won the European Championship with Spain and the Premier League with Manchester City. A win for Mbappé would break that run and reset the award's logic: individual brilliance, at a historic level, would be declared sufficient on its own.
That is why the vote matters beyond one player's cabinet. If trophies decide it, the award stays a team prize worn by an individual. If Mbappé's scoring records decide it, the award becomes something closer to what he told RFI radio it already is: "They won't announce a team in the envelope; they will announce a player." Either way, the precedent set on Monday will be cited in every Ballon d'Or argument for years.
There is exactly one recent precedent for what Mbappé is asking the jury to do. In 2013, Cristiano Ronaldo won the Ballon d'Or without a major trophy, on the strength of 66 goals for club and country in a season when Portugal fell in the World Cup play-offs and Real Madrid finished as league runners-up. The parallel is close enough to be encouraging and distant enough to be a warning: Ronaldo's case rested on an overwhelming volume of goals across every competition, while Mbappé's rests on dominance of the scoring charts in three specific ones.
The difference between the two cases is the World Cup. Ronaldo's 2013 had no tournament in it; Mbappé's 2026 is defined by one, and by a record — the all-time World Cup scoring mark — that no voter can have missed. Against that stands a simpler objection, voiced by his own goalkeeper: "Individually, no player was better than him this year, but sadly, we didn't win any trophies," Thibaut Courtois told DAZN. The jury must decide whether a record that will stand for a generation outweighs a season that won nothing.
The result will rearrange three clubs' stories at once. A Kane win crowns Bayern's season and gives England its first Ballon d'Or winner since Michael Owen in 2001; a Yamal win confirms Barcelona's generational bet and makes a teenager the face of the sport; a Mbappé win hands Real Madrid the vindication of a trophy-less season and reframes its summer rebuild around a single player. The timing sharpens all of it: Real Madrid and Barcelona meet in El Clásico on Sunday, the day before the ceremony, so the weekend's football will still be echoing when the envelope opens.
There is also a commercial shadow. The Ballon d'Or carries no cash prize, but it raises a player's worth and status, and the winner's sponsors and club will price that in immediately. For Mbappé, who has chased this award through nine nominations, a win would close the one gap in a career that already contains a World Cup; a loss would leave him, at 27, waiting for a season in which the goals and the trophies finally arrive together.
The ceremony begins at 8pm London time on Monday at the London Palladium, with DAZN carrying a free live stream. The men's prize is the headline, but the evening also settles the women's award, the goalkeepers' Lev Yashin Trophy and the coaches' prizes, and the full rankings will show how far apart the three favourites really were. Watch first for the margin: a Kane win by a distance confirms the trophy logic, while a narrow Mbappé win suggests the jury split down the middle. Either way, the debate that has filled the last month will have a name attached to it by Monday night — and the next argument, about whether the jury got it right, will start immediately. For context, the Bureau has followed the season's other record-chasing forwards and the Spanish football establishment's recent battles in its own pages: Erling Haaland's record scoring run, Real Madrid's demand for the La Liga president's resignation, and Spain's appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport after its FIFA penalty.
The Western lens: goals are the argument, trophies are the objection Seen from the Western press box, this is a contest between two definitions of greatness. The British and European coverage frames Kane as the favourite on the strength of volume — 73 goals and a league title — and Yamal as the romance of the race, a world champion at 19. Mbappé is treated as the outsider with the strongest single argument and the weakest collective one, a player whose own club manager, José Mourinho, has backed him publicly — "We know who has made history this summer" — while the betting markets keep him third.
The Eastern lens: the market has already voted, and it voted for Kane From the East Asian betting boards, the race looks less close than the arguments suggest. Odds carried by the region's sports outlets put Kane at 1.45, Yamal at 3.25 and Mbappé out at 25.00, with Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the Champions League winner with Paris Saint-Germain, a distant outsider. Those prices are not votes, and the jury is not the market — but they measure where informed money thinks the journalists landed, and they suggest the jury's centre of gravity sits with the player who combined goals with titles rather than the player who combined goals with history.
The Southern lens: a record the whole football world can read From the Global South, the race reads differently again. Al Jazeera's breakdown centres the World Cup record itself — the tournament the South watches most, and the one in which Mbappé passed Messi — while African voices have lined up behind him: former Togo striker Emmanuel Adebayor told Afrik-Foot that individual performances should decide it, saying simply, "For me, it's Mbappé." In this telling, the award is not a European club prize but a world prize, and the world record, set on the world stage, is the credential that travels furthest.
The 70th Ballon d'Or ceremony takes place on Monday, 26 October 2026, at the London Palladium Theatre, starting at 8pm local time. It is the first time the gala has been held outside Paris, with London chosen in tribute to Stanley Matthews, who won the first award in 1956. Kate Scott and Thierry Henry host the evening, and DAZN carries a free live stream.
Mbappé's individual numbers are unmatched — top scorer in La Liga, the Champions League and the World Cup — but he won no trophy last season. Real Madrid finished second in La Liga and lost their Champions League quarter-final to Bayern Munich, while France finished fourth at the World Cup. For a decade every winner has held at least one trophy, and bookmakers therefore rank Kane and Yamal ahead of him.
Harry Kane is the bookmakers' favourite after scoring 73 goals for club and country and winning the Bundesliga with Bayern Munich, while also leading England to third place at the World Cup. Lamine Yamal won the World Cup with Spain and La Liga with Barcelona, and at 19 is the youngest of the three favourites. Reigning winner Ousmane Dembélé and Lionel Messi are also among the 30 nominees.
Yes, most recently Cristiano Ronaldo in 2013, when he won the award on the strength of 66 goals for club and country despite Real Madrid finishing as league runners-up and Portugal falling in the World Cup play-offs. That precedent is central to Mbappé's case, although Ronaldo's argument rested on sheer volume across all competitions, while Mbappé's rests on topping the scoring charts in three major competitions.
