Harry Kane’s first Ballon d’Or caps a season that put him at the center of the men’s game. The Bayern Munich striker scored 73 goals in 2026 and helped England reach the World Cup semi-finals, becoming the first English winner since Michael Owen in 2001. The combination matters: Kane’s award recognizes a prolific individual season, while England’s run gave his campaign a prominent international stage.
It’s a striking outcome for a player whose case rests on both output and visibility across club and national football. A Ballon d’Or is an individual honor, but the achievements around it help explain why a season resonates with voters and supporters alike. Kane now joins a winners’ list that has included some of the game’s most familiar recent names.
Alexia Putellas claimed the women’s award for a third time, her first win since returning from a major knee injury. Her move from Barcelona to London City Lionesses came in the summer, after most of her career had been spent with the Catalan club. That timing gives the award a personal dimension: it recognizes a return from a serious setback and arrives as she begins a new chapter away from the club most closely associated with her career.
The 70th Ballon d’Or ceremony took place in London, the first time the event had been held outside France or Switzerland. Alongside its two headline awards, the ceremony recognized players, coaches and clubs across several categories. The breadth of the honors offers a useful snapshot of the season’s strongest teams and individual campaigns, though awards spread across categories don’t necessarily tell one unified story.
Barcelona and Spain collect honors
Barcelona’s success ran through the awards. The club won Women’s Club of the Year after a trophy laden campaign under Pere Romero, who led the team to the league title, Copa del Reina, Supercopa and UEFA Champions League. Four titles give the club a strong claim to recognition; they also show how much of the women’s awards picture was shaped by one team’s domestic and European success.
Romero also received the Johan Cruyff Trophy for Women’s Coach of the Year. Since joining Barcelona in 2024, he has recorded 91 wins, three draws and five losses in 99 matches, a 91.92% win rate. Those figures describe an unusually successful run, but they also reflect the strength of the squad and club around him. A coach’s record is rarely a story of one person alone.
Spain coach Luis de la Fuente took the men’s coaching award after leading the national side to its second World Cup title in the United States. That achievement gave Spain’s international campaign a central place among the ceremony’s results. Spain’s tournament success also featured in the goalkeeper awards: Unai Simón won the men’s Yashin Trophy after his campaign with Athletic Bilbao and the national team. Barcelona’s Cata Coll took the women’s award. The two wins point to goalkeeping seasons recognized across both club and international settings, rather than a single shared team story.
Paris Saint-Germain was named Men’s Club of the Year after winning the Champions League for a second consecutive season and claiming another Ligue 1 title. Barcelona’s Vicky López and Lamine Yamal won the women’s and men’s Kopa Trophies, respectively, recognizing the best under-21 players. The club honors underline the importance of sustained team results, while the Kopa awards put the focus on emerging players whose careers are still taking shape.
Individual awards span goals and service
Kane also won the men’s Gerd Müller Trophy for the year’s leading striker. Charlyn Corral of Mexican club Pachuca received the women’s award after scoring 49 goals. These prizes narrow the focus from the broader Ballon d’Or race to one question: who delivered the clearest scoring season? The awards recognize goals, though a scorer’s contribution can’t be reduced to a tally alone.
Bukayo Saka won the Sócrates Award for humanitarian work with BigShoe, which provides medical care to children in need. His speech included a letter from a boy he had helped. This is more significant than it looks: the ceremony briefly widened its definition of a player’s public contribution, connecting football fame with work that has a direct human purpose.
The main men’s race had drawn attention to Kane, Kylian Mbappé and Yamal. Kane’s win adds his name to a recent list that includes Ousmane Dembélé in 2025, Rodri in 2024, Lionel Messi in 2023 and Karim Benzema in 2022. That sequence makes clear how quickly the award’s recent story can change, even as each winner arrives with a different season and set of claims.
Putellas joins that recent women’s winners’ list with her third award. Aitana Bonmatí won three consecutive times from 2023 to 2025, while Putellas also took the 2022 honor. Their repeated wins show how concentrated the award has been among Spanish players in these years. And yet, Putellas’s latest victory comes after an injury and a summer move, giving this win a distinct context from her earlier success.
What the awards say about the season
The spread of awards points to a season shaped by Spain’s international success and Barcelona’s strength in the women’s game, while Kane’s first Ballon d’Or gives England a new name at the top of the men’s winners’ list. The ceremony also recognizes achievement at different scales: team trophies, individual scoring, coaching, goalkeeping, youth development and humanitarian work. Those categories can sit side by side without adding up to a single verdict on what mattered most.
If you’re working in this space, the useful signal is how the awards connect individual recognition to the teams and competitions around it. Kane’s season combines goals with an England run; Putellas’s award marks both a return from injury and a change of club; Barcelona and Spain appear repeatedly across the winners. The harder question is what comes next for the players and teams named here. The ceremony can record a season’s achievements, but it can’t settle whether those patterns will continue.
A crowded awards list. That’s part of its appeal, and part of its limit: it shows many kinds of success, while leaving readers to judge how they fit together.
Men’s Ballon d’Or winners (2022–2026)
2026 – Harry Kane (England)
2025 – Ousmane Dembélé (France)
2024 – Rodri (Spain)
2023 – Lionel Messi (Argentina)
2022 – Karim Benzema (France)
Women’s Ballon d’Or winners (2022–2026)
2026 – Alexia Putellas (Spain)
2025 – Aitana Bonmatí (Spain)
2024 – Aitana Bonmatí (Spain)
2023 – Aitana Bonmatí (Spain)
2022 – Alexia Putellas (Spain)