Harry Kane’s 100th Bundesliga goal came too late for the Ballon d’Or, and he should win it anyway
The 2026 vote closed its window on the night of the World Cup final. On what he did before then, Kane’s case is still the strongest.
Sep 25, 2026
Harry Kane’s penalty against Union Berlin on 18 September was his 100th Bundesliga goal, in his 98th Bundesliga game. Nobody had ever got there faster. It is also the one thing he has done lately that the Ballon d’Or jury will not be looking at.
The 2026 award covers 3 August 2025 to 19 July 2026, the day of the World Cup final. Everything since then, the record included, belongs to next year’s vote. That matters, because a lot of the noise around this race has come from September, and September does not count.
What Kane did inside the window
Strip the record out and Kane’s case barely changes. He scored 73 goals in 65 games for Bayern and England across the eligible season. Sixty-one of those came for his club: 36 in the Bundesliga, 10 in the DFB-Pokal, 14 in 13 Champions League games and one in the Supercup.
He also finally has the medals people used to hold against him. Bayern won the league, the cup and the Supercup, and Kane was the Bundesliga’s top scorer for a third straight season. Then he went to the World Cup and scored six more.
Good numbers for a striker would be half that. These are absurd for anyone, and I struggle to see how a jury looking at the whole season gets past them.
The case against, and why I don’t buy it
The argument against Kane is the one that always comes up in a World Cup year: he did not win it. England went out 2-1 to Argentina in the semi-final on 15 July, and Kane barely had a sight of goal in Argentina’s box that night.
Spain did win it, beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time in New Jersey. Rodri took the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player, and Lamine Yamal, still only 19, can point to a La Liga title, the league’s player of the season award and a World Cup winner’s medal to go with his Euro 2024 one. Both would be fair winners. Rodri, in particular, missed long injury spells for City during the season, and still ran the midfield of the world champions.
Kylian Mbappé scored ten times at the World Cup and won the Golden Boot, and Ousmane Dembélé, the holder, scored in a Champions League final that PSG won on penalties against Arsenal.
But the Ballon d’Or is meant to judge a season, not a month. Rodri’s club year was patchy, and nobody else on the list gets near Kane’s 73. If a tournament run can outweigh a full season this far above everyone else’s, the voting window might as well start in June.
Where that leaves the vote
My guess is the jury leans towards Spain. It wouldn’t be a scandal. It would still be the wrong call.
Kane turned 33 in July. He has spent most of his career being told he needed trophies to be taken seriously, and in the one season that counts for this award he won three of them and the European Golden Shoe on top. The winner is named at the London Palladium on 26 October. It should be him.