The London Palladium has hosted variety shows, rock concerts and royal performances, but on Monday night it hosted something it had never hosted before: football’s most famous individual coronation. For the first time in its long history, the Ballon d’Or ceremony was held in London, and a theatre audience in evening dress waited for the answer to the question the whole sport had been arguing about for months: who won the Ballon d’Or 2026?
The short answer is a pairing nobody had predicted a year ago. The men’s Ballon d’Or went to Harry Kane of Bayern Munich and England, the first of his career and the first for an English player in twenty five years. The women’s Ballon d’Or went to Alexia Putellas of Spain, her third golden ball, won in the city she now calls home after her summer move to the London City Lionesses.
So who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 is only the beginning of the story. Kane also collected the Gerd Müller Trophy as the top scorer of the season, Spain swept almost every other honour on the night, and Lamine Yamal made history of his own by winning the Kopa Trophy for the third year running. This report walks through the ceremony, the season that made Kane the winner, the comeback that restored Putellas to the top, the full list of winners, the complete men’s rankings from first to thirtieth, and the numbers that explain the vote. For the reaction as it develops, follow more stories in our News section.
A Historic Night in London
Before anyone could answer who won the Ballon d’Or 2026, the evening itself had already made history. This was the seventieth edition of the award, organised by France Football since 1956, and the first ceremony ever staged in London. The London Palladium, a theatre better known for pantomime and variety, was dressed for the occasion with a red carpet, a wall of photographers and rows of the most famous footballers on the planet sitting in theatre seats.
The ceremony was presented by Thierry Henry and Kate Scott, a pairing that mixed playing royalty with one of the most familiar broadcasters in the game. In keeping with a night that refused to follow a script, proceedings began late, which only stretched the tension in the room. Thirty nominees had been reduced to rumours, favourites and long shots, and every delay made the final announcement feel further away.
There was a sombre moment among the gold. The ceremony paid tribute to Kevin Keegan, the double Ballon d’Or winner who died earlier this year. Keegan belonged to the generation that made English footballers credible contenders for this prize in Europe, and his memory hung over an evening that would end with another Englishman finally lifting the trophy. If you want to relive the running order of the night, the official Ballon d’Or live coverage followed every award as it was announced.
By the time the final envelopes were opened, the theatre had seen Spanish winners, teenage winners, a goalkeeper honoured and a humanitarian prize for Bukayo Saka. But the two golden balls were always going to define the night, and both went to players whose stories had been building for years. The question of who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 stayed open until the last minutes of the ceremony, which is exactly how a seventieth birthday should feel.
Harry Kane: The Season That Finally Brought the Golden Ball
Ask a neutral who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 and the numbers answer before the opinions do. Harry Kane scored seventy three goals for his club and his country across the period under review, the highest total of all thirty nominees. It was the kind of season that removes argument, and it ended with Ronaldo Nazário, one of the greatest strikers of all time, handing him the trophy.
Kane’s club season with Bayern Munich brought both weight and silverware. Bayern won the Bundesliga and the German Cup, and Kane’s goals powered both campaigns. Then came the World Cup summer, the stage where English captains are judged most harshly. Kane scored six goals at the 2026 World Cup and led England to the semi finals, close enough to glory to make the eventual defeat hurt, and far enough to prove his season belonged at the very top of the sport.
The historical weight of the win is considerable. Kane is the first English winner of the men’s Ballon d’Or since Michael Owen in 2001, a gap of twenty five years that covered entire generations of English talent. Players came and went, some of them world class, and none of them took this trophy home. Kane has now ended the wait, and he did it in London, in front of a home crowd, in the city where his career began.
It was a double celebration on the night, because Kane also won the Gerd Müller Trophy, the award for the best striker, on the strength of those seventy three goals. That is why, when people ask who won the Ballon d’Or 2026, the honest answer starts with a season rather than a ceremony. The golden ball was decided across twelve months, and nobody in football put together twelve months like Harry Kane.
Alexia Putellas: The Queen Is Back on Top
On the women’s side, the answer to who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 felt like a homecoming in every sense. Alexia Putellas won the women’s Ballon d’Or for the third time, after her victories in 2021 and 2022, and she won it in London, the city she moved to this summer when she left FC Barcelona for the London City Lionesses after winning everything there was to win in Spain.
Her Barcelona record explains why her name carries such weight. Putellas scored two hundred and thirty two goals for Barcelona, a total only Lionel Messi has surpassed for the club across both the men’s and women’s teams. In her final season there, as captain, she scored twenty goals and gave fifteen assists, leading from the front in the manner that defined an era. Leaving a club where you are a monument is a brave decision at any age. Doing it and then winning the Ballon d’Or in your first months away is a statement.
The emotional core of her win is the road back. Putellas once received one of her previous trophies while on crutches, recovering from a serious cruciate ligament knee injury, and her return to the summit of the women’s game is a story of reconstruction as much as talent. Form can be rebuilt in a season. A career, after an injury like that, has to be rebuilt piece by piece, and she has now completed the job for a second time.
Behind her, the voters placed Ewa Pajor of Barcelona in second and Khadija Shaw of Manchester City in third, two strikers whose seasons would have won the prize in many other years. Putellas succeeds Aitana Bonmatí, the winner in 2023, 2024 and 2025, who was absent from the 2026 list because of injury. The crown passed from one Spanish great to another, and who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 on the women’s side was, in the end, the player who defined the decade before Bonmatí and has now reclaimed it.
The Full List of Winners at the Ballon d’Or 2026
The two golden balls answer who won the Ballon d’Or 2026, but the ceremony handed out a full set of honours covering young players, goalkeepers, scorers, coaches, clubs and one prize that has nothing to do with football at all. Here is every winner from the London Palladium, in one place.
The two main awards:
- Men’s Ballon d’Or: Harry Kane (Bayern Munich, England)
- Women’s Ballon d’Or: Alexia Putellas (London City Lionesses, Spain)
The young player awards both stayed in familiar hands. Lamine Yamal of Barcelona won the men’s Kopa Trophy for the third consecutive year, a record, after his wins in 2024 and 2025. Vicky López of Barcelona won the women’s Kopa Trophy for the second year running.
- Men’s Kopa Trophy: Lamine Yamal (Barcelona)
- Women’s Kopa Trophy: Vicky López (Barcelona)
- Men’s Yashin Trophy: Unai Simón (Athletic Bilbao)
- Women’s Yashin Trophy: Cata Coll (Barcelona)
The scoring and coaching prizes underlined who dominated the season. Kane completed his double with the men’s Gerd Müller Trophy, while Charlyn Corral of Pachuca took the women’s award with forty two goals in forty two matches for her club and fourteen more for Mexico. The Johan Cruyff Trophy for coach of the year went to Luis de la Fuente, who led Spain to the World Cup, and to Pere Romeu of Barcelona on the women’s side.
- Men’s Gerd Müller Trophy: Harry Kane (Bayern Munich)
- Women’s Gerd Müller Trophy: Charlyn Corral (Pachuca)
- Men’s Johan Cruyff Trophy: Luis de la Fuente (Spain)
- Women’s Johan Cruyff Trophy: Pere Romeu (Barcelona)
- Men’s Club of the Year: Paris Saint-Germain
- Women’s Club of the Year: FC Barcelona
- Sócrates Award: Bukayo Saka (Arsenal)
The Sócrates Award, given for humanitarian work, went to Bukayo Saka of Arsenal, recognised for his work with organisations including Big Shoe, which funds medical care for children. It was one of the warmest receptions of the night.
The Men’s Rankings: The Top 10 and the Full Top 30
The rankings give the full shape of the race behind who won the Ballon d’Or 2026. Kane took first place, and behind him the voters gathered a top ten heavy with Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich shirts. The other nine finalists in the top ten, presented here without their individual order, were:
- Ousmane Dembélé (Paris Saint-Germain), the outgoing holder of the trophy
- Erling Haaland (Manchester City)
- Khvicha Kvaratskhelia (Paris Saint-Germain)
- Kylian Mbappé (Real Madrid)
- Lionel Messi (Inter Miami)
- Michael Olise (Bayern Munich)
- Rodri (Manchester City)
- Fabián Ruiz (Paris Saint-Germain)
- Lamine Yamal (Barcelona)
From eleventh to thirtieth, the published ranking reads as a roll call of the season:
- 11. Jude Bellingham (Real Madrid)
- 12. Pau Cubarsí (Barcelona)
- 13. Achraf Hakimi (Paris Saint-Germain)
- 14. Vitinha (Paris Saint-Germain)
- 15. Declan Rice (Arsenal)
- 16. Ferran Torres (Barcelona)
- 17. Vinícius Júnior (Real Madrid)
- 18. Marc Cucurella (Chelsea)
- 19. João Neves (Paris Saint-Germain)
- 20. Willian Pacho (Paris Saint-Germain)
- 21. Gabriel Magalhães (Arsenal)
- 22. Lautaro Martínez (Inter)
- 23. Nuno Mendes (Paris Saint-Germain)
- 24. Luis Díaz (Bayern Munich)
- 25. Marquinhos (Paris Saint-Germain)
- 26. Dayot Upamecano (Bayern Munich)
- 27. Bruno Fernandes (Manchester United)
- 28. Julián Quiñones (Al-Qadsiah)
- 29. William Saliba (Arsenal) and Sadio Mané (Al-Nassr), tied
Two stories hide inside that list. The first is depth: Paris Saint-Germain placed player after player throughout the thirty, the statistical signature of the men’s club of the year. The second is youth. Yamal reached the top ten at nineteen, an age at which most players are hoping for a first team debut, and Cubarsí finished twelfth. The next era is not coming. On this evidence, it is already seated in the theatre, and it will not wait long before turning the debate about who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 into a debate about itself.
Why the Voters Chose Kane
To understand who won the Ballon d’Or 2026, follow the goals. Kane scored seventy three times for club and country in the period under review. The closest scoring rivals among the nominees, Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland, finished on fifty eight each. Fifteen goals is not a margin, it is a different category, and the voters treated it that way.
Scoring alone does not win this award, as many great finishers have learned. What separated Kane was the completeness of the year. His goals came with the two biggest domestic prizes in Germany, the Bundesliga and the German Cup. They came with a World Cup campaign in which he scored six times and captained England to the semi finals. Club season and national team summer pointed in the same direction, and in a World Cup year that alignment matters enormously to the journalists who vote.
There was also the matter of the calendar. The reference period ran from the start of August 2025 to the end of July 2026, taking in the whole club season and the World Cup that Spain won by beating Argentina in the final. Kane performed across every month of it. Michael Olise, his Bayern team mate, supplied thirty five assists, the highest total among the nominees, and still the story of Bayern’s season was the man finishing the chances.
Lionel Messi, nominated for the seventeenth time at thirty nine and chasing a ninth title, could not match a younger man’s volume. Yamal, dazzling as he was, is nineteen and has time. That is the core of who won the Ballon d’Or 2026: the voters rewarded the most complete season in world football, produced by a captain at the peak of his powers, on every stage that mattered.
What Putellas’ Third Crown Says About the Women’s Game
The debate about who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 will run all winter on the men’s side, but the women’s result may be the one that historians underline. A third crown for Putellas, spread across 2021, 2022 and now 2026, makes her the defining player of the era in a way a single win never could. One golden ball is a season. Three, separated by a serious knee injury and a change of club and country, are a career.
Her story also corrects a lazy habit in how comeback stories are told. Putellas did not simply return to her previous level and get rewarded for the journey. She changed her environment entirely, leaving the club where she had scored two hundred and thirty two goals, and then produced a season strong enough to beat the best players of her old club and everyone else. The voters were not honouring nostalgia. They were ranking the present, and she topped it.
Look at the rest of the women’s honours and a map of the game appears. The women’s Kopa Trophy went to Vicky López, the women’s Yashin Trophy to Cata Coll, the women’s coach award to Pere Romeu and the women’s club of the year to Barcelona, while Ewa Pajor, also of Barcelona, finished second in the main vote. Spain and Barcelona did not just attend the women’s ceremony. They organised their evening around collecting its prizes, with Khadija Shaw’s third place for Manchester City a reminder that England’s league now stands in the same conversation.
The generational handover is visible inside that sweep. López and Coll are the future collecting awards in the present tense, while Putellas, the captain of the previous era, stands above them all holding the biggest prize of the night. Women’s football is often described as a sport in a hurry. London showed something better: a sport with depth, memory and a queue of talent behind its champion. It also framed the simplest fact of the evening: who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 on the women’s side was the player the whole era has revolved around.
A Spanish Night in London
If one country owned the evening, it was Spain. The World Cup final in the summer ended with Spain beating Lionel Messi’s Argentina, and the Ballon d’Or ceremony in the autumn read like the same story told in a theatre. Spain, in short, became the second answer to who won the Ballon d’Or 2026, because nearly every road through the night led back to Spanish football.
Count the honours. Putellas took the women’s golden ball. Luis de la Fuente, the coach who guided Spain to the World Cup, took the men’s coaching award. Lamine Yamal won the Kopa Trophy for a record third consecutive year. Unai Simón was named the best men’s goalkeeper in the world. On the women’s side, Barcelona collected the club award, the young player award, the goalkeeping award and the coaching award, and placed Pajor second in the main vote.
Even the exceptions had Spanish fingerprints. The men’s club of the year, Paris Saint-Germain, reached their summit with Fabián Ruiz in the top ten of the main ranking. Kane’s individual triumph was real and deserved, but it happened inside a ceremony that otherwise functioned as a celebration of the country that currently plays the best football on earth.
For England, the host nation, the night still delivered its own landmark. Kane’s win ended a twenty five year wait, Saka’s Sócrates Award drew one of the loudest ovations, and Shaw’s third place confirmed the strength of the English women’s game. London provided the stage. Spain provided most of the winners. And an Englishman provided the headline.
How the Ballon d’Or Vote Works
Understanding the jury helps explain who won the Ballon d’Or 2026. The award is not decided by fans, sponsors or an algorithm. It is voted on by journalists from the one hundred highest ranked countries in the FIFA rankings, one specialist voter per nation, each ranking the nominees they judge to have had the finest season.
The calendar shapes the contest as much as the jury does. For this edition, the reference period ran from 1 August 2025 to 31 July 2026, which means the voters weighed the closing stretch of the club season and, above all, the 2026 World Cup played inside that window. A player brilliant in October and quiet in June was always going to struggle against a player who delivered in both halves of the year. Kane’s season was built exactly for that test.
The prize itself is older than most of the institutions around it. France Football created the men’s Ballon d’Or in 1956, which makes the London ceremony the seventieth edition of the award. The women’s Ballon d’Or is far younger, first presented in 2018, and its short history makes Putellas’ collection of three titles in that span even more remarkable. She has won more than a third of the women’s golden balls ever awarded.
Because each edition covers a fixed season rather than a calendar year, the vote rewards sustained output over long stretches, interrupted by one enormous tournament. That structure, more than any single match, is the hidden answer inside who won the Ballon d’Or 2026.
The Ballon d’Or 2026 in Numbers
The story of who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 can also be told in a column of figures, and the figures are emphatic:
- 73 goals for Harry Kane for club and country, the highest total among the thirty nominees
- 58 goals each for Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland, his nearest scoring rivals
- 35 assists for Michael Olise, the most creative return of any nominee
- 3 Ballon d’Or titles for Alexia Putellas, after 2021 and 2022
- 25 years since the previous English winner, Michael Owen in 2001
- 17 nominations for Lionel Messi, who was chasing a ninth title at thirty nine
- 3 consecutive Kopa Trophies for Lamine Yamal, a record for the young player award
- 9 players from Paris Saint-Germain in the final thirty, more than any other club
Read together, those numbers describe a changing of the guard that refused to fully change. The top of the ranking belongs to an established captain in his prime and a queen restored, while the bottom half fills with teenagers and twenty year olds from Paris, Barcelona and Madrid. The question of who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 has a veteran answer. The question of who wins it next is wide open.
What This Night Means for Kane and Putellas
Years from now, who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 will be a quiz question with two neat answers. Kane. Putellas. But the meaning of the night is larger than the answers, because both winners arrived at the golden ball by the long road, and both rewrote something about their own reputations on the way.
For Kane, the trophy closes the last open argument about his career. Great strikers are sometimes remembered with an asterisk for the prizes that escaped them, and for years that shadow followed him from season to season. A league title, a cup and now the Ballon d’Or, all gathered in one stretch of his career, remove the asterisk entirely. He is no longer the finest player of his generation still waiting for recognition. He is the winner of the biggest individual prize in the sport, collected from the hands of Ronaldo Nazário, in his home city, at the end of the most prolific season any nominee produced.
For Putellas, the third crown does something subtler. It separates her from the pack of great players who defined a few seasons and places her among the very few who defined an era. She won before her injury, she endured receiving a trophy on crutches, she rebuilt, she changed clubs and leagues, and she won again. Players who come back are admired. Players who come back and take the crown a third time become the standard everyone after them is measured against.
There is a final symmetry worth savouring. On the night London first hosted the ceremony, the men’s prize went to England’s captain and the women’s prize went to a Spaniard who had just made London her home. That is why who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 will be remembered as more than a result. It was the night two long stories were rewarded at once, in the right city, in the right order.
FAQ
Who won the Ballon d’Or 2026?
Harry Kane won the men’s Ballon d’Or 2026. The Bayern Munich and England striker received the trophy from Ronaldo Nazário after scoring seventy three goals for club and country, winning the Bundesliga and the German Cup, and leading England to the World Cup semi finals. He is the first English winner since Michael Owen in 2001. The full answer to who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 also includes Alexia Putellas, who won the women’s award on the same night.
Who won the Women’s Ballon d’Or 2026?
Alexia Putellas won the women’s Ballon d’Or 2026, ahead of Ewa Pajor of Barcelona in second place and Khadija Shaw of Manchester City in third. Putellas, who joined the London City Lionesses from Barcelona this summer, succeeds her former team mate Aitana Bonmatí, the winner of the previous three editions. Her win means the answer to who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 includes a third career title for the Spanish captain.
Where was the Ballon d’Or 2026 ceremony held?
The ceremony that decided who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 was held at the London Palladium in London, on Monday 26 October 2026. It was the seventieth edition of the award and the first ceremony ever staged in London. The evening was presented by Thierry Henry and Kate Scott and included a tribute to Kevin Keegan, the double winner who died earlier this year.
How many Ballon d’Or titles has Alexia Putellas won?
Three. Putellas won the women’s Ballon d’Or in 2021 and 2022, and her victory in London makes her a three time winner. That is why the question of who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 now has the same women’s answer as it did at the start of the decade, despite her serious knee injury and her move from Barcelona to the London City Lionesses in between.
Who votes for the Ballon d’Or?
The journalists who decide who won the Ballon d’Or 2026 come from the one hundred highest ranked countries in the FIFA rankings. Each voter ranks the nominees on the season under review, which for this edition ran from 1 August 2025 to 31 July 2026 and included the 2026 World Cup. The award is organised by France Football, which created it in 1956.
That is the complete picture from the London Palladium: every winner, every ranking and every record from the night the golden ball came to London. If the gold and the glamour have worn you out, join our readers taking a breath with why everyone is talking about the soft life, and we will see you at the next ceremony.