The World Cup is over, Spain are champions, and football’s attention has already shifted to the next big prize. The 2026 Ballon d’Or will be handed out on October 26 in London, and for once, nobody can call this race predictable.
For more than a decade, the conversation began and ended with two names: Messi or Ronaldo. That era is gone. This year’s shortlist reads like a cross-section of the entire sport, a 19-year-old wonderkid, a 32-year-old still chasing history, a Bayern Munich striker who quietly put together one of the great individual seasons in recent memory, and two Frenchmen who spent the year trading trophies between them.
Spain’s triumph in New York has scrambled the odds boards. Here’s a look at the five players with the strongest claim to walk away with the Golden Ball this autumn.
1. Lamine Yamal
Yamal has gone from Ballon d’Or hopeful to outright favourite in the space of one summer, and it’s not hard to see why. He finished the 2025-26 season with 24 goals and 18 assists in 45 appearances for Barcelona, numbers that would be remarkable for a striker, let alone a teenager playing off the right wing. Add a La Liga title and a Champions League campaign that produced ten more goal involvements, and you already have a resume most players would take a career to build.
Then came the World Cup. Yamal wasn’t at full fitness heading into the tournament after a muscle issue, and his output on paper, one goal in eight appearances, undersells what he actually did on the pitch. He kept dragging defenders out of position, kept creating space nobody else on the field could see, and kept doing it in the biggest games of his life. Spain lifted the trophy, their second World Cup, and Yamal was at the centre of it.
At 19, he’s already been runner-up for the award once, finishing behind Ousmane Dembélé in 2025. Bookmakers now have him around 2/1, and pundits like Gabby Agbonlahor have been blunt about where they see this going. “I look at Lamine Yamal,” Agbonlahor said on talkSPORT. “He won the Euros before, won the World Cup this year, won LaLiga. I see Yamal picking it up.” His market value has reportedly climbed to around $250 million, level with the highest valuation in the sport. If the voters want a World Cup winner who also dominated domestically, there’s no cleaner case than his.
2. Harry Kane
Kane went into the World Cup as many people’s favourite, and honestly, it’s easy to forget just how absurd his season was before a ball was even kicked in North America. Seventy-two goals and seven assists in 61 games for Bayern Munich and England. Three trophies with Bayern. A European Golden Shoe. At some point you run out of superlatives and just start listing numbers.
Then the World Cup complicated things a little. Kane scored six goals as England reached the semi-finals, becoming the country’s all-time leading scorer at the tournament in the process, which is no small thing given the names on that list. But he went quiet from the round of 16 onward, and World Cup voting tends to reward players who peak exactly when the stakes are highest. England also fell to Argentina in the final four, meaning Kane doesn’t have the World Cup winner’s medal that Yamal, Rodri, and Messi all carry into the conversation.
Even so, he leads several bookmakers’ boards, and it’s not close to a fluke. A club season like his doesn’t happen by accident, and if the panel weighs the full year rather than just the tournament, Kane still has as strong a case as anyone.
3. Lionel Messi
Yes, at 38, Messi is still in this conversation, and it says everything about the man that nobody finds that strange anymore. Argentina reached another World Cup final, this time falling to Spain, and Messi captained a side that many had written off after the group stage wobbles. He didn’t dominate the tournament the way he did in 2022, but he didn’t need to. His presence alone reshaped how opponents approached every Argentina match, and he was still the one Argentina looked to when games tightened up.
An eighth Ballon d’Or would be almost unthinkable for any other player at this stage of a career, but this is Messi we’re talking about. Bookmakers had him among the frontrunners heading into the final in New York, and while Spain’s win has shifted momentum toward their own players, ruling Messi out entirely still feels premature. Football has a habit of underestimating him right up until it can’t.
4. Ousmane Dembélé
Defending a Ballon d’Or is one of the hardest things to do in football, and Dembélé came close to pulling it off. PSG retained both Ligue 1 and the Champions League, with Dembélé scoring 20 goals across the season, including decisive strikes against Liverpool, Bayern Munich, and Arsenal in the knockout rounds. That’s not a squad player padding his numbers. That’s a guy showing up in the matches that decide trophies.
France started the World Cup looking like potential champions, and Dembélé was central to that, scoring five goals before the semi-final against Spain. Then Les Bleus lost, and with that defeat went a huge chunk of his momentum. World Cup years have a way of rewarding whoever’s still standing at the very end, and Dembélé wasn’t. His club season alone keeps him firmly in the top five, but the France exit likely costs him a repeat.
5. Kylian Mbappé
Mbappé had the kind of World Cup that will be replayed in highlight reels for years. Ten goals took him past the tournament’s all-time scoring record, finishing his World Cup career with 22 goals, a mark that may stand for a very long time. Paired with 42 goals for Real Madrid across the season, it’s hard to argue with the raw output. Few players on the planet can match his combination of speed, finishing, and big-game instinct.
The problem, if you can call it that, is the same one facing Dembélé. France’s run ended in the semi-final, and Mbappé doesn’t have a Champions League or World Cup winner’s medal to put alongside the individual numbers. Golden Boot winners have taken home the Ballon d’Or before, but rarely without team success to back it up. Still, in a field this open, a scoring record at the World Cup is not something voters can easily ignore.
The Honourable Mentions
A handful of others deserve a nod before the ceremony rolls around. Rodri anchored Spain’s midfield throughout the tournament and already has a Ballon d’Or on his shelf from 2024, though a stretch of injuries during the club season may have blunted his case. Erling Haaland scored seven goals as Norway reached the quarterfinals in their first World Cup appearance since 1998, backing that up with 38 goals across all competitions for Manchester City and a third Golden Boot in four seasons. Jude Bellingham, Michael Olise, and Vinícius Júnior all showed up in the conversation before the tournament even began, and none of them has fully dropped out of it.
The ceremony lands in London on October 26, and for the first time in years, there isn’t an obvious runaway winner walking in. Spain’s World Cup win has pulled the spotlight toward Yamal and Rodri, Kane’s club form refuses to be ignored, and Messi’s name alone guarantees he’ll be part of the story regardless of where he actually finishes. Expect the debate to run hot right up until the envelope opens.
