The Ballon D’Or shortlist is out and now the electioneering begins. Bayern Munich would very much like Harry Kane to win it – their last was in 1981. The Football Association would presumably very much like Kane to win it – their last was in 2001.
Harry Kane would presumably like to win it too and that means lots of interviews where you say it would be an honour and you’re just glad to be in the running but do you remember all those goals?
He deserves it. We can all be deliberately cynical and snide if we want, but concluding that Kane has been the best player in the world this year is entirely uncontroversial. He scored 73 goals, which is the second most ever for a player in Europe’s top five leagues. And the only player with more was Lionel Messi, who is an alien freak and only did it once.
Kane played 51 times for Bayern last season and scored 61 goals; these are Messi and Ronaldo numbers. He won the European Golden Shoe because he was nine league goals ahead of Erling Haaland (who we consider to be a meat robot from the future) in four fewer games.
And he’s not even just a goalscorer. Kane’s majesty in dropping deep and playing passes around the corner or on the turn are the piece de resistance of his Bundesliga form. Oh yeah: he also scored in all five of the Champions League knockout matches he played in this year.
Kane joined Bayern in the summer of 2023 (Photo: Getty)History is certainly against Kane. While World Cup glory isn’t usually required – Fabio Cannavaro in 2006 was the last player to combine the two – only one player since 2013 has won the Ballon D’Or without winning either a major international trophy or the Champions League in that year. Perhaps only scoring in both semi-final legs while his team conceded six times to lose 6-5 on aggregate will do for him.
But then Kane only needs to be better than the competition and he has been. You can make a case for Rodri and his World Cup Golden Ball, but he barely made a difference in club football this year. You could say Lamine Yamal is the wonder talent, but his World Cup was comparatively tepid and he didn’t reach the Champions League semi-finals. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia was the Champions League star but didn’t play in the World Cup. Kylian Mbappe top scored in both competitions but didn’t win any trophy.
Would Kane’s victory feel a little like a lifetime achievement honour? Maybe. He has been grossly overlooked in the past: 146 club goals in three seasons, 308 league goals in 12. There are no gaps in that run yet Kane has never finished higher than tenth in this reckoning. Perhaps it really is just his time.
This would be considered a fallow year as a result, I suppose. But then that is less damnation of the present and more a reflection of the ludicrous duopoly age that we have just left, when you’d start with Messi and/or Ronaldo and work down from there. Individual awards are going to get weird for a while. Best get used to it.
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The Journeyman: AFC Wimbledon and the fear of losing their soul Tottenham: Four reasons for Spurs’ lack of goals – and the latest on Richarlison’s futureThe oddity here is how Kane’s individual success seems to anger people. I think there’s absolutely a danger that, because we no longer see his domestic goalscoring in full focus, Kane’s performance is judged through the England prism and in that prism his brilliance has been normalised to the point of tedium. He scored six goals at this summer’s World Cup and honestly it barely registered in the list of England narratives.
There’s also an odd dichotomy with England players right now: people are angrier about England getting close to winning something than they were about England getting nowhere close. What started as pure positivity in 2018 has warped since and Kane, the captain and the standard-bearer, has suffered as a result. Failing to win makes you a nearly man and nearly men are the first losers.
I hope he wins it. For the prodigious, almost unthinkable goalscoring record. For the decision to leave English football. For the adaptation of his game from pure goalscorer to something complicated and beautiful. For the recognition of a monastic dedication to being the best he could be. And for that column I wrote 11 years ago when I wondered whether Kane could follow up one good Premier League season.
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