If Bayern Munich and England star Harry Kane wins the Ballon d'Or on Monday, he'll have done something only four of his countrymen have managed before him.
England, and by extension the Premier League, feels unloved when it comes to this honour. Kane is the bookies' favourite to take the award, and rightly so. His form last season was unbelievable: 73 goals in 65 matches.
"I think my wife would prefer to know and my family, it's very stressful for everyone. I have never liked talking too much about myself," Kane said in an interview with Marca.
"The only thing I would say is that last season was incredible, both personally and as a team. By far, it was the best season of my life. But the Ballon d'Or is not in my hands."
If Kane is crowned on the award's 70th birthday, he'll become the fifth Englishman to cradle the golden football, alongside Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Bobby Charlton, Kevin Keegan and Michael Owen. It's a rare accolade. Era-defining teams have missed out on having one of their own honoured. Generational players have reached the podium but never the top step. Some years -- like 2010 -- saw English players snubbed from the shortlist entirely.
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There is no shortcut to winning the Ballon d'Or; no alchemy you can concoct to guarantee the gong. That's what happens when you have 100 journalists voting for it. But there are ways you can boost your chances: win the World Cup, triumph in the Champions League, boast sport-defining ability in these days of social reach, reels and FIFA. Or alternatively, have Cruyff, Platini, Van Basten, Beckenbauer, Ronaldo (x2) or Messi on the back of your shirt. Playing for Barcelona or Real Madrid helps too. As did playing in the Bundesliga in the 1970s, or in Italy through the 1980s and into most of the 1990s.
On form and stats alone, Kane should win. But sometimes, the eventual recipient of the golden football does not quite conform to logic.
England and the Ballon d'Or: An uneasy marriage
The great Sir Stanley Matthews already had the 1953 FA Cup final named after him by the time he received notification he'd won this new award for the best European player in 1956. Real Madrid's Alfredo Di Stefano would have expected the accolade to head in his direction given his goal-a-game 1955-56 season, but Matthews, 41, pipped him to the award, winning by 47 points to 44. The man himself was sheepish about the honour.
"To my complete surprise and embarrassment, it was given to me," Matthews wrote in his autobiography The Way it Was. "I couldn't believe my performances warranted such a prestigious award but, for all I felt others were more worthy, it is something I look back on with great pride."
The award was the brainchild of sports writers Gabriel Hanot and Jacques Ferran under magazine France Football. At the start, only European players were eligible, meaning Pelé and Garrincha both missed out. In 1995, this was expanded to any player at a European club. It came too late for Diego Maradona, but led to George Weah becoming the first non-European to win it that year.
By 2007, all footballers were eligible, and from 2010 to 2015 national-team captains and coaches joined journalists in voting for the award, until 2016 when France Football regained sole control and returned to a journalists-only vote. Over the last decade, the award has been decided by votes from 100 journalists: one from each of the top hundred countries in FIFA's men's rankings.
England's record is one thing, but British football more broadly has had its own complicated relationship with the award. For the first 15 or so years of the award, the United Kingdom didn't do too badly. The 1960s saw Celtic win the 1967 European Cup, Manchester United claim the trophy the following year and England win the World Cup in 1966. Wales' John Charles, England's Billy Wright, Duncan Edwards, Johnny Haynes and Jimmy Greaves finished on the podium in the award's first decade, while Scotland's Denis Law won it 1964 and Bobby Charlton claimed it in 1966. In 1967 Charlton was second, with Celtic's Jimmy Johnstone third. A year later, Manchester United completed a one-two with Northern Ireland's George Best winning and Charlton second. It was a solid return for the U.K. but even then, some took umbrage with the winners.
When Charlton finished second in 1967 to Hungary's Flórián Albert, Liverpool manager Bill Shankly took to his newspaper column to voice his displeasure at the injustice and the voting process. Shankly wrote: "It all sounds rather arbitrary for one man to represent one country, big or small, prominent in soccer or not. Surely a fairer way would be to have a panel from each country to discuss the nominations before submitting them. My strong contention is British football is so dominant that our players should be much more strongly represented in the list of nominated footballers."
In hindsight, perhaps the honour should have gone to Johnstone, given he was one of Celtic's famous "Lisbon Lions" who won the European Cup. That's something still lamented to this day by those in green and white, but the Scottish press at the time focused more on the novelty of having two Scotland-based players finishing in the top 10, rather than the perceived injustice of a bronze place.
Charlton's win in 1966 would be England's last until 1978 when Kevin Keegan won the award in consecutive years while at Hamburg in an era where German clubs were in vogue. An article in 1977 already lamented the dwindling number of British players nominated: "The reality of British football days is that England and the other home countries possess barely a handful of outstanding international players between them. It is a far cry from the 1950s and 1960s when rarely a year went by without a British player being among the top three in the pool ... since the early 1970s we have waited in vain for a player to follow them and capture the imagination of the Europeans."
The following decade saw Scotland's Kenny Dalglish take second in 1983 -- a snub which has subsequently been held up alongside Andrés Iniesta as one of the greatest players never to win the Ballon d'Or (it's also incredible that Andrea Pirlo never featured in the top three). Gary Lineker finished second in 1986 at a time when Serie A dominated the award. There were hopes in 1996 and 1999 that Alan Shearer and David Beckham would take the crown respectively, but both missed out. Take 1999 -- in a non-World Cup year, Beckham inspired Manchester United to their remarkable treble, but it was Rivaldo who pipped him due to his goalscoring.
"[Beckham] was my great rival and a great player who would have deserved to win," Rivaldo said. "He proved it by winning four titles with Manchester United. But the many goals I scored made the difference. Beckham has won all the major trophies this season and his passing is great, but he scores fewer goals than me."
In 2001, Owen became the last Englishman to win it (much to Spain's bemusement as Raúl missed out). "It means more now than it did then," Owen said on talkSPORT in May. "When you're a player. When you do something good, when you win something, it's only good for three or four days. You've then got another game and another game. Now I can sit at home all I like and watch that little golden thing spinning around and I can do that for hours on end if I choose. I can take it in; I can appreciate it." Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard finished second and third in 2005 before nearly two decades of the Ronaldo and Messi duopoly.
Jude Bellingham finished third in 2024, but Kane has never finished in the top 10. As he waits nervously to see if he'll become just the fifth English player to win the award, supporters of Kylian Mbappé, Lamine Yamal, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Rodri's causes have been getting ever more vociferous.
Kane, history, and the sport's biggest prize
Bad news Kane fans; history suggests the award could end up with Mbappé or one of Spain's hopefuls. Playing for Real Madrid or Barcelona helps: players from those clubs have won it on 12 occasions.
Winning a World Cup also helps get a foot in the door. Given the original award did not include Brazilian players, France Football has conducted a retrospective reassessment of certain years, determining Pelé and Garrincha would have won at least three Ballons d'Or, if not plenty more. They also believe Mario Kempes would have usurped Keegan in 1978.
In a World Cup year, often a player from the winning country claims the top honour. Exceptions include Johan Cruyff in 1974 and Luka Modrić in 2018, but in both instances, their teams reached the World Cup final. Alongside Cruyff and Modric, the only two winners in World Cup years who didn't feature for the winning side and haven't been retrospectively displaced in the reassessment were Ronaldo in 2014 and Messi in 2010. That duo also bucked the trend of the Ballon d'Or winner in a specific year helping their team to a major European title, something Messi didn't manage in 2010, 2012 and 2019, or Ronaldo in 2013.
"For a decade, Messi and Ronaldo were on another planet," Wayne Rooney said in 2020. "In almost any other era of football, players from our England generation would have won one, but those two set standards that were almost impossible for anyone else to reach." The nadir for English football came in 2010 when not a single player was on the 23-man shortlist.
The players know the significance of team silverware when it comes to individual awards, too.
"[The Ballon d'Or] will depend a lot on the team's achievements and what he does with England. He's a fantastic player," Jude Bellingham said of Kane in April.
"I could score 100 goals this season but if I don't win the Champions League or the World Cup, you're probably not going to win the Ballon d'Or," Kane said in November. "It's the same with Erling Haaland, it's the same with any player. You have to be winning those major trophies."
Perception and bias also play a role. Individual brilliance is rewarded, as are are aesthetic qualities which, according to several journalists ESPN spoke to, inevitably favour teams in Spain rather than the more team-first, meticulously strategised nature of the Premier League.
"There are several reasons why, I think, British players haven't been especially successful," Professor Simon Chadwick tells ESPN. "For a start, it is a prize initiated by a French football magazine and is nowadays supported by UEFA. Hence, it has always had something of a Francophile orientation. One wonders whether things might have been different if a British football publication had started a Golden Ball competition.
"National and international politics matter, perhaps more than ever nowadays.
"At the same time, there is a prevailing global opinion that whilst the Premier League is fast and exciting, British players are artisans rather than artists. They may work hard and demonstrate total commitment, but their style of play is functional rather than beautiful.
"Plus, the British tend to be rather reserved (a national trait) when it comes to internationally hailing their best players. In recent weeks, we have seen or heard people, from Luis Enrique to Lamine Yamal, talk about the Ballon d'Or merits of different players during their respective press conferences. British football, especially in this era, teams tend to be group rather than star-oriented; lobbying of the type exhibited by the likes of Enrique is therefore mostly resisted or frowned upon."
As we've seen with Eurovision, sometimes it's also fun to vote against the English hopeful. But away from the minutiae and trends, looking back at previous years there's also a brutal reality: English players haven't always been good enough. "I can't think of an English player who SHOULD have won," a source told ESPN. "Perhaps Wayne Rooney? But he was always overshadowed by Messi and Ronaldo."
When the winner is announced on Monday in London -- the first time the ceremony has been held there -- Kane will find himself at the mercy of 100 journalists. Some will write down the names of Spain's World Cup winners, or PSG's Champions League contingent. "Based on the past 12 months, Kane should win the Ballon d'Or," Jamie Carragher wrote in his Telegraph column in July. "Unfortunately, he probably won't because in a World Cup year it is bound to go to the star player of the winning nation."
But there will also be those backing Kane, who look to individual records, and believe the Englishman's astonishing 73-goal season should be heralded. He already has the support of his teammates and his England manager Thomas Tuchel. Kane has scored more goals in the last four major tournaments than any other European player. "He does everything," Kane's Bayern teammate Luis DÃaz said. "[Kane] Scores, assists, defends. He was one of the top scorers in the whole world. That's why I think he deserves it. 100% without a doubt. He always wants more and refuses to settle. He helps you grow as a teammate."
If anyone is going to change the fortunes of England and the Ballon d'Or, it's Kane. "Only Lionel Messi has ever scored more goals in a season than Harry Kane," Rio Ferdinand said when Kane was awarded the European Golden Shoe. "You won the Golden Boot, you were England's top scorer at the World Cup. Who else should win the Ballon d'Or? Who else but Harry?"
