EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsIt's probably going to be Harry Kane or Lamine Yamal -- the 33-year-old or the 19-year-old.At least, that's what the prediction markets are telling us: Kane currently has about a two-in-three chance of winning the men's Ballon d'Or, Yamal a 28% chance, and then the remaining percentage points get split among Kylian Mbapp and Lionel Messi.This is a silly award. You probably don't need me to tell you that, but it bears repeating since it seems as if the players themselves care more about it than ever before.If you look back at the development of the odds, Messi was the favorite before the World Cup final and then Kane was the favorite after the World Cup final ... even though Kane didn't play in the World Cup final.Or to put it another way: If Yamal scored a goal in the World Cup final, he'd probably be the heavy favorite to win the award. He took four shots, more than anyone in the match, but since none of them went in, it means he might not actually be the best soccer player in the world.OK, fine, this award isn't necessarily trying to identify the best player in the world. Well, it is -- but it also isn't.Among the Ballon d'Or regulations, Article 2 reads: "The Ballon d'Or rewards the best male and female player in the world, regardless of league or nationality."But then Article 4 says: "The Ballon d'Or is awarded based on three criteria, in order of importance: 1. Individual performances, decisive and impressive character. 2. Collective performances and titles won. 3. Class and fair play."So, it goes to the best player regardless of league or nationality -- but one of the main criteria is team performance, which rewards players who play on the best teams and were born in the right countries?It makes no sense, which makes it easy to make just about any argument. In a way, everyone is right.But let's just say this thing worked like the most valuable player award in American sports. If it did, which man should be getting the trophy at Monday's awards ceremony?Who does conventional wisdom say should win?To get a somewhat objective, general sense of how the season went, let's first take a look at the European Sports Media Team of the Month. Since 1995, a group of journalists have voted on a starting 11 of the best players on the continent every month. They've given us a consistent, historical database for perceived performance at every position across the top leagues in the world.Messi made 88 teams of the month, Cristiano Ronaldo is second with 51, and no one else has more than 34. That's a pretty good summation of the state of play since 1995, is it not?Among currently active players in Europe, Napoli's Kevin De Bruyne (32 appearances) and Liverpool's Virgil van Dijk (30) rank fourth and sixth all time -- and they're the only current Europe-based players to hit 30. The next closest is Real Madrid's Mbapp with 25.Here's who led the way in Team of the Month appearances last season:1) Harry Kane: 82) David Raya: 7T-3) Gabriel Magalh�es, Declan Rice and Michael Olise: 66) Kylian Mbapp: 5T-7) Erling Haaland and Achraf Hakimi: 4The most interesting name there is Raya, who didn't even make the 30-team Ballon d'Or shortlist. (In fact, no goalkeepers made the shortlist.) Raya failed to make the Team of the Month only twice, in January and February.January went to Anatoliy Trubin, who scored -- yes, scored -- the spectacular last-second goal against Real Madrid to qualify Benfica for the knockout rounds of the Champions League. And then February went to Manchester City's Gianluigi Donnarumma, who led all goalkeepers with two TOTM appearances the season before.The most interesting name not there is Raya's international teammate, Yamal. He made only two Teams of the Month -- fewer than Manchester City's Nico O'Reilly, PSG's Vitinha and Nuno Mendes, Bayern Munich's Joshua Kimmich and Arsenal's William Saliba.Then, of course, we have the World Cup. One simple, imperfect way of looking at that tournament in a similar way is to see how many Man of the Match awards a given player won. It's close to impossible for a defender to win one, unless they score a goal. But like I said: imperfect!The leaders:1) Lionel Messi: 52) Jude Bellingham: 4T-3) Kylian Mbapp, Erling Haaland and Vincius Jnior: 3Kane and Yamal (and Ronaldo, huh?, and a bunch of others) each won two. Olise and Hakimi nabbed one. Raya didn't play a single minute in the tournament, and Magalh�es and Rice both left with zero.Who was actually the best soccer player in the 2025-26 season?We'll start with the simple numbers: goals+assists. We're looking at total production, not per-90 performance, since every game counts unlike in American sports.Across Europe's Big Five top leagues, the Champions League and the World Cup, who had the most goals+assists? Here's the top 10:There's a clear top two, but as we went over last year: goals+assists still doesn't tell us everything we want to know. Assists are just passes that another guy converted into a goal, and not all goals are created equal.So, we can look at expected assists, a measure of the quality of the passes a player is making -- regardless of what the guy on the end of the pass does. And we can adjust the goals number to account for penalties -- the average penalty is converted 79% of the time, so rather than rewarding the player for being chosen to take the penalty, we'll give them 21% of a goal for each penalty they scored.The list now looks like this:Kane and Mbapp are essentially equal, and Olise and Haaland have both also closed the gap to the top. Here, I'd also like to point out that Messi ranks 139th on this list -- above Rafael Le�o and just slightly below Christian Pulisic -- despite the numbers only counting his eight matches from the World Cup.Of course, scoring and creating chances isn't the only thing a soccer player does. The newest widespread advanced metric -- possession value -- looks at how much each action a player takes on the ball increases or decreases his team's chances of scoring a goal. If we swap that in for expected assists, then here's how our top 10 looks:So, while the adjustments brought everything closer together, there's a clear top two in attacking production -- Kane and Mbapp -- followed by Olise and Haaland in a tier right behind. And then there's another tier with Vinicius Junior, Yamal, and Luis Daz.Should that be what the final ballot looks like?My ballot for the 2026 Ballon d'OrThis is by no means a clean or even an analytically sound analysis. Most of the numbers come from models, and models are, well, models of reality, not objective truth. Even minor-seeming changes in what your expected-possession value is estimating -- is it probability of a goal in the next 10 seconds; by the end of the possession; within the next 10 touches? -- can drastically change the end results.Still, models like the xPV from Stats Perform do something we can't: watch and contextualize every single touch a player takes across an entire year. And when you do that, there's a clear group of players who stand out: Kane, Mbapp, Haaland and Olise.That tracks nicely with the media voting from throughout the season: They were the four attackers with the most Team of the Month appearances.But what about the likes of Raya, Rice, Magalh�es and Hakimi?Raya, I think, benefits from being the backstop for the best defense we've seen in a long time. He's very good, but he's not saving so many shots more than you'd expect that you could argue he's providing as much value as any of these attackers.Rice is the best midfielder in the world, but he's not so much better than No. 2 that he should vault over a superstar attacker. A relatively muted World Cup didn't help, either.Magalh�es winning wouldn't feel right; most would agree that he's not even the best center back on his own team. (That'd be William Saliba.) And Hakimi is the best fullback in the world, but he didn't have the kind of outlier season he had the year before.So, who should win? All four of the players mentioned above would be worthy winners. And I'd extend it out to five options.At this exact moment, Yamal is the best player in the world -- in my opinion -- but even if you adjust for the difficulty of the leagues, then his production over the 2025-26 season still trails Olise, and they play the same position. I wouldn't give it to him, but Messi was the best player at the World Cup and seems as if he might actually be the best player in the world -- still. He's going to get first-place votes.If we account for league difficulty, then Mbapp had the best season by my made-up adjusted goals+xPV number -- by a significant margin. LaLiga is the second-best league in the world, he racked up numbers in the Champions League and the World Cup, and he adds extra value in possession in a way that neither Kane nor Haaland do. His xPV was more than Kane and Haaland combined.Olise, meanwhile, led all players in xPV while rarely turning the ball over and pressing aggressively. Mbapp, of course, barely even presses anymore. On top of that, Real Madrid have been a worse team since he joined, and PSG got better as soon as he left.The main thing that's holding me back from picking Olise is that he didn't score at the World Cup. He was second on France with around 2.5 expected goals, and there's nothing to suggest he's a bad finisher anywhere else in his career, but ... you've got to put the ball into the net to actually realize the value you're creating by getting the shot in the first place. He could've easily scored four goals from those shots, and if he did? Then I'm putting him at No. 1.That seems silly, but I really think that's how slim the margins are among this top group of players. I also haven't really mentioned anyone on PSG -- they're all hurt by the fact that they barely play any minutes in Ligue 1. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, in particular, was second behind Mbapp for the goals+xPV number in the Champions League. He presses, he doesn't lose the ball, and he gets dinged because he played so few league minutes and because he's from a tiny country that didn't qualify for the World Cup.All of which leads me to my No. 1 pick, who gives us something close to the best of all worlds: a goal scorer who isn't a complete zero on the defensive end and who contributes in buildup play.He's someone who was great in domestic league play, great in the Champions League, and great in the World Cup. And although he plays for a financially dominant team in an uncompetitive league, his knocked out Real Madrid in the quarters and nearly knocked off PSG in the semifinals.Here, then, is what the top 10 of my ballot would look like:1) Harry Kane, Bayern Munich2) Michael Olise, Bayern Munich3) Lamine Yamal, Barcelona4) Kylian Mbapp, Real Madrid5) Erling Haaland, Manchester City6) Declan Rice, Arsenal7) Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, PSG8) Gabriel Magalh�es, Arsenal9) Lionel Messi, Inter Miami10) Julin lvarez, Atletico Madrid
