Kane’s Ballon d’Or triumph a glorious riposte to celebrity fawning of ceremony | Barney Ronay

Well, there’s something new. Football: now available in new, genuinely heartwarming flavour.

There was a lovely moment at London’s Palladium theatre, with the clock creeping towards 11pm at the end of a startlingly shrill and bloated evening of never-ending awards and never ending award-related excitement.

Not just for Harry Kane, who is now the 2026 men’s Ballon d’Or winner, and in the process placed indelibly in that lineage of elite footballers. But also, frankly, for anyone watching, as Kane stood on stage gazing a little shyly at his golden orb, and kicked off his speech by thanking everyone, paying tribute to everyone, everywhere, then finally cracking into tears and a strangled croak as he thanked his parents for sacrifices made, his wife for always being there, and even, in slightly jarring vibe-shift from the warm honeyed tone, José Mourinho.

Even Kane’s biggest advocates will rarely claim their man is one of a kind, sui generis, in the mode of the Ronaldo-Messi godhead. But Kane is exactly this in his own admirably humble way.

Not just exceptional footballer, the best, most deserving men’s player in the world this year, a European golden boot, scorer of 89 goals since August 2025, Bundesliga champions, World Cup semi-final captain, model of extreme professionalism and care. He’s also quite clearly the nicest man, if not just in football, then possibly the world.

Or at least it felt like that as he walked off in that very dear and tender way, the centre of the world in that moment, but also just keen to get off the stage and let everyone get on with clearing up.

It would be wrong to say Kane’s victory in the final vote of the night redeemed the grotesqueness of the ceremonies itself. There was a roomful of hugely deserving winners here. But Kane hits particularly hard.

And the Ballon d’Or is, let us be clear, a horrendous event, albeit a supremely popular horrendous event. There was the usual pomp around the ceremony, staged this year at a fancy hotel close to Oxford Circus.

This isn’t sport. It’s celebrity culture, red carpet fawning, the worship of images and people, and fame. Football isn’t supposed to be cocooned this way, to send the message that there are barriers and ropes and special people. Yeah, well, good luck with that.

The night kicked off with French Montana in spotless white tuxedo performing on an open-air double-decker bus. He definitely speaks, clearly, carried well, seemed enthusiastic. If it all goes south from here, the evidence suggests French Montana could, at the very least, get a job as a London tour bus operator.

Before long Thierry Henry and Kate Scott glided on stage, half an hour late, to add a little deft and easy charm to a furloughs schedule of pots and prizes.

And the awards came thick and fast. The Spain manager, Luis de la Fuente, won coach of the year. “I hope in the future I will become in English better,” were his first words at the lectern, throwing his hat in the ring for a disastrous pension-padding six months at Manchester United two years from now.

There was a lovely moment as Burna Boy came on to present the Socrates award for charitable works to Bukayo Saka. He was asked if there were footballers who had inspired his love for the game. At which point he looked at Thierry Henry and said, “definitely, one of them’s standing right there”, and of course he said it in his Burna Boy voice, looking Thierry deep in the eyes so smooth and deep, just almost impossibly sexy moment.

The Ballon d’Or can be unintentionally hilarious at times like these. There were just so, so many video tributes, so much excitingly portentous music. This is a stage where everyone happening at every moment is very clearly the most important thing ever to happen, superseded only by the next thing to happen on that stage, and then the thing after that.

The degree of fawning is startling at first, but glazed by familiarity before long. At one point Cristiano Ronaldo appeared very briefly in a fact-cut big-screen montage and the crowd shrieked a song, clutched its hand to its fevered throat, collapsed into the aisles in sheer priapic excitement.

Although by the time the original Ronaldo emerged onstage at 10.44pm, there was a sense of the genuinely vertiginous company Kane was about to join. Ronaldo read out the name inside the envelope, and the hall collapsed into cheers and yells and roars as Kane appeared onstage.

And yes the Ballon d’Or is a fundamentally silly thing on its own terms. As a concept it jars with the basic concept of team sport, promoting instead the opposite of sport, the opposite of team culture, the modern disease of fawning parasocial engagement with star names.

In many ways the world would be a better place if the Ballon d’Or was simply abolished, as an example to all who pore over reels and clips and the imagined qualities of their celebrity paramours.

But it is also fascinating, unignorable, and endlessly moreish. All the more so this time. Kane as the Ballon d’Or 2026 is a genuinely fine, uplifting, instructive moment in the spotlight.

It is always tempting to talk about the journey these players make. Everyone has a backstory. Most footballers come from adversity. Kane has this, in his own way, 16 years into a professional career, which has names like Leyton Orient, Millwall, Leicester and Norwich on the timelines. He was unexceptional as a junior, didn’t stand out as particularly skilful or big or outstanding in his numbers. He played as a holding midfielder for a bit while Spurs decided what to do with him.

Kane worked relentlessly. He was Millwall young player of the year 2012, fitting bookend to the Ballon. He made it because he simply refused to go away, to stop working, honed instead the deeper skills in his quiver, the purity of his shooting, the range of his passing long and short

And Kane is exceptional in other ways. Without ever peacocking around promoting his brand, without really trying he remains the most likable, authentic, role-model-ish modern-day England player. For a man who never talks big or acts big he has a happy knack of becoming the key player wherever he goes. Perhaps Kane has become cool now. He has always been likable, with that mild-mannered air of a kindly Victorian chimney sweep with a hamster in his waistcoat watch pocket. In the Bayern years, Kane has become leaner, more glossed and handsome, jawline, tan, iconic Vampire hairline.

Mainly he expresses a common confusion about what talent really is. Talent isn’t simply moments, reels, physical capacity. Talent is also application, focus, craft, the ability to work, to make others better.

And yet his elite career has also been oddly grudging. Somehow the idea has always been out there that Kane is undeserving of these accolades, despite his own mildness and humility, his obvious team qualities, his relentless delivery of goals, effort, leadership. It is a genuinely odd conclusion given the opposite is so manifestly true, that this is an entirely uplifting story of overachievement, of hard work and applied intelligence, as opposed to the kind of talent that just needs to be flame-throwered in the right direction.

It is undeniably true that Kane’s levels can drop dramatically when he can’t perform at his full physical capacity. There have been moments where it has been tempting to wonder if he’s gone far enough as England’s sole in the last few years, if his body and his talent deserve a little care.

Well, that just shows how wrong you can be. And now we have this, complete vindicator of his own efforts, his ability to learn and adapt, and to get better every year, even as his ability to move and run has declined. And in the process a rare moment of stillness, a clean, crisp pocket of light, and a moment of ultimacy.