Why Does Everyone Around Harry Kane Believe He'll Win the Ballon d'Or?

Bayern Munich has several of its own players on this year's Ballon d'Or shortlist. This month, the club asked those players a direct question: why should Harry Kane win the award instead of one of them?

The answers were remarkably consistent. Michael Olise needed just eight words: "Because he was the best player last season."

Luis Díaz went further. "He does everything. He attacks, defends, assists. He was one of the top scorers in the whole world last season. That's why I think he deserves it. 100%," he said.

Joshua Kimmich made a similar point from a different angle. "Apart from the goals, he's incredibly important for the team," Kimmich said. "If we're already winning 3-0 and he isn't scoring, that isn't a reason for him to be unhappy."

That's an unusual public show of solidarity, a club effectively asking its own Ballon d'Or nominees to campaign for a teammate rather than themselves.

That solidarity isn't the whole picture, though. Kane's own countryman Thierry Henry has separately named Mbappé as his personal favourite, with Olise close behind, and has said he believes Olise was actually the better player in Germany last season.

Henry doesn't actually have a vote himself, but his opinion carries real weight, and it shows that even among current nominees and high-profile former players, there's no real consensus.

The men's Ballon d'Or is decided by 100 specialised journalists, one from each of the top 100 nations in the FIFA rankings, each naming their own top 10 for points. The criteria, in order of importance, are individual performance, team achievements and titles, then class and fair play.

Kane's numbers give him a genuine case on the first count. Bayern's official breakdown puts him at 73 goals for club and country in 2025/26, in just 65 appearances, second only to Messi's 82 in 2011/12 as the best scoring season by anyone this century.

That splits into 61 for Bayern, 36 in the Bundesliga, 10 in the German Cup, 14 in the Champions League and 1 in the Supercup, plus 12 for England including 6 at the World Cup, where they finished third, their best result since actually winning it in 1966.

He also won the Bundesliga, DFB-Pokal and Franz Beckenbauer Supercup with Bayern this season, and claimed the European Golden Shoe. Despite all that, his best previous Ballon d'Or finish is 10th, reached three separate times.

Here's the case for Kane in full, and why four other players still have a genuine claim to take it from him.

The case for Kane, and where it isn't unanimous

The Bayern backing isn't Kane's only support. Declan Rice, his England teammate, backed Kane after Arsenal's Champions League win over Napoli, even though Rice is nominated for the same award himself.

"I know who I want to win it," Rice said. "I'd love to see Harry Kane win it, so I'm wishing him all the best in that."

That disagreement between Henry and Olise is the detail that complicates Kane's case the most, though.

Even people who've watched him at close range all season can't agree on whether raw output should outweigh everything else, which is essentially the whole Ballon d'Or race in miniature.

The four strongest cases against him

Kylian Mbappé isn't waiting for others to make his case. He told L'Équipe directly, "I believe I can win it this year. It's one of my goals, and a short-term one at that, because there isn't much time left."

His numbers support the confidence: 42 goals in 44 games, the Pichichi with 25 LaLiga goals, top scorer in the Champions League with 15, and a second career World Cup Golden Boot with 10 goals in 8 games.

His weak point is the team-achievement criterion specifically. Unlike Kane, Yamal and Rodri, he ended the season without a major club or international trophy.

Lamine Yamal's case combines individual production with genuine team success. He scored 16 goals and added 11 assists as Barcelona retained LaLiga, officially named the league's Player of the Season.

He also became the first player nominated for the Ballon d'Or three years running before turning 20, something nobody has done before, and Spain won the World Cup itself on top of that.

The complication is his individual World Cup output. Yamal scored once and recorded no assists across Spain's run, although his tournament was also affected by fitness issues.

Rodri's case is built around the strongest individual tournament of any midfielder in the field. He won the World Cup Golden Ball as its best player without scoring a single goal, completing 122 line-breaking passes across eight games, the most by anyone since Xabi Alonso in 2010.

That would make him the 11th player ever to win the World Cup, the Champions League and the Ballon d'Or. Working against him is a club season interrupted by injury.

One statistical model built specifically to weight attacking output, by its own creator's admission, actually ranked Rodri last of the sport's twelve leading contenders, a good illustration of how differently this race can be read depending on what's measured.

Then there's Messi, whose World Cup campaign put him back into the conversation at 39. He scored 8 goals and supplied 4 assists in 8 World Cup appearances as Argentina reached the final, before Spain won it in extra time. He didn't register a goal or assist in the final itself.

That still earned him the Silver Ball as the tournament's second-best player, behind only Rodri. Diego Simeone has publicly backed him over both Yamal and Mbappé on the strength of doing this at his age, and one ranking model that assessed all twelve contenders placed Messi 2nd overall, well above Rodri.

The arguments are fundamentally different from one another. Kane offers extraordinary volume and consistency, Mbappé elite scoring across multiple competitions, Yamal a genuine trophy alongside real individual output, Rodri the tournament's own top individual honour, and Messi another exceptional World Cup at an age nobody expected.

Bayern's own Ballon d'Or nominees have publicly argued Kane should win over themselves, one of the more unusual forms of backing anyone in this race has.

Whether that's the same thing as having the strongest case under the award's own criteria is exactly what those 100 voting journalists now have to decide before the ceremony on 26 October.