Back for its 70th year, the Ballon d'Or ceremony will once again recognise the best footballing talent in the world. Run by France Football magazine since 1956, it is widely viewed as the pinnacle of individual prizes for professional footballers worldwide. As ever, the shortlists of contenders for the biggest awards of the night have been a hot topic of debate among football fans.
The 2026 Ballon d'Or ceremony will take place at on Monday, 26 October, at London's Palladium Theatre. It is the first time the event will be held in London, a move which Uefa says is to pay tribute to the inaugural winner, England's Stanley Matthews in 1956. The ceremony is traditionally held in France, and has taken place in Paris' Theatre du Chatelet since 2019.
A dual voting system is used to determine Ballon d'Or winners. For the men's award, a finalised shortlist of 30 players is decided by a team of journalists from both France Football and L'Equipe newspaper and published a couple of months before the ceremony. This shortlist is then ranked by 100 journalists from around the world, with their rankings combined to decide the winner.
Jurors are instructed to take three factors into account when ranking players. The Ballon d'Or regulations list the following in order of importance: Individual performances, decisive and impressive character You can read more about the process, and how it works for the women's award, in our Ballon d'Or voting explainer. A ceremony that lands in the months following a major tournament always provides extra intrigue - and tournaments don't come more major than the World Cup.
It means that jurors can take international performance into account when ranking the shortlisted players for the men's prize. With Spain victorious in the 2026 World Cup, it could boost the rankings of the six Spanish internationals on the shortlist. But outstanding individual performances for club and country, even without a return of silverware for the latter, also puts players like Harry Kane, Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland into contention.
England captain Kane scored 73 goals across club and international competitions in the 2025-26 season. While jurors are told to only take the most recent season into account when ranking players, Kane's astonishing 156 goals in 158 games for Bayern Munich since 2023 has lifted him to seventh in the German club's top scorer list. He has led the Bundesliga's scoring charts for three consecutive seasons, as well as being Europe's top overall club goalscorer for 2025-26.
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