He scored them in 65 games for Bayern Munich and England last season.

For comparison purposes, since 2000, the only player to score more in a single campaign is Lionel Messi, whose 82 in 2011/12 has sat there for 14 years like a high score on an ancient arcade machine nobody else can reach. 

Cristiano Ronaldo's best was 69, and Kane went past that during the World Cup, aged 32, while dropping so deep so often that opposition defenders must have struggled to work out whether he was actually even on the pitch for large spells.

Scoring for fun in Munich

The Bayern tally came to 61 in 51 games: 36 in the Bundesliga, 14 in the Champions League, 10 in the DFB Cup and one in the Supercup, as if he were filling in a sticker book and refused to leave a gap.

That works out to roughly a goal every 66 minutes, which really isn't normal. He won the Torjagerkanone - Germany's equivalent of the Golden Boot - for the third season running as a result, and also earned his second European Golden Shoe, finishing nine goals clear of Erling Haaland.

He also won things with his team, which for a long time was the only stick anyone had left to beat him with. His Bayern career began with a 3-0 Supercup defeat to RB Leipzig in 2023, and plenty of people (some of them in north London) enjoyed that more than was strictly healthy.

Last season brought the Bundesliga, the Supercup and Bayern's first DFB Cup for six years, the first domestic cup of his career. The trophy cabinet jokes have passed their use-by date.

The lion's share for England

For England, Kane scored 12 in 14 appearances as the Three Lions won every qualifier and finished third at the World Cup, their best performance at a tournament since 1966. Kane got six of their goals in North America.

Ballon d'Or voting covers August 2025 to July 2026, so nothing he has done since will count, including Wednesday night's goal and assist against Arsenal, a habit he picked up at Tottenham and has seen no reason to drop.

He has eight goals in nine Bundesliga and Champions League games this season and six in four for England, so if any voters worried that 2025/26 was a one-off, they needn't have.

Not a one-horse race

There is a case against him, and it rests almost entirely on the second of the three criteria voters are asked to weigh.

On individual performance, he wins easily. Team achievement is where his case gets stickier.

Bayern went out of the Champions League to PSG in the semi-finals, 6-5 on aggregate, and Kane's equaliser in the second leg came in the 94th minute, roughly when it stopped mattering. England were beaten 2-1 by Argentina in Atlanta, with Lautaro Martinez heading in a Messi cross in stoppage time. Spain won the tournament, Rodri was named its best player, and Kylian Mbappe took the Golden Boot with 10 goals while Kane finished joint-fifth.

The third criterion, "class and fair play", sounds like something drafted for a Victorian cricket club, and no one has seriously suggested Kane fails it. With no red cards since a 2011 loan spell at Leyton Orient and an almost universal level of respect amongst his peers in the game, he should be fine there.

So who beats him? Lamine Yamal, with 24 goals and 18 assists in all competitions, back-to-back LaLiga titles and a World Cup winner's medal at 19, is the real threat, and he will win this award one day, probably more than once.

It was a brilliant season, but nobody will measure future ones against it the way they will against Kane's.

Still, when the World Cup handed out its own individual prize, it went to Rodri. Mbappe scored 42 for Real Madrid and won that Golden Boot, but Madrid finished the season empty-handed, and France lost the third-place play-off 6-4 to England.

PSG are European champions, though the credit is shared among Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Vitinha, Fabian Ruiz, Ousmane Dembele, and a few others. Unfortunately, that is the price now being paid for being a proper team. 

No shade towards the Bundesliga

The usual objection to Bayern players winning these awards is that the Bundesliga is often (and unfairly) labelled a procession, but Kane can hardly help that.

It also doesn't explain the 14 Champions League goals in 13 games, one fewer than Mbappe, scored largely against teams who are a bit better than Heidenheim.

The domestic detail that genuinely complicates things is that Kane wasn't even voted the Bundesliga's player of the season. His teammate Michael Olise won it, having set up more league goals than anyone, and you'd imagine Kane was on the end of a fair few of them. You can read that as a point to argue against Kane's case.

In reality, it simply means Bayern had two of the best attacking players in Europe, and one of them banged in 73 goals.

Panto season at the Palladium

If Kane is overlooked for this year's Ballon d'Or, there is a genuine precedent for protest. In 2024, Real Madrid found out Vinicius Junior wasn't winning and cancelled the club's trip to Paris altogether, a high-profile, stroppy objection carried out entirely by staying at home. 

England fans and the English media can do better than a sulk. The ceremony is in the West End, on Argyll Street, which leaves plenty of room for an orderly queue of furious people who will each, when they reach the front, say "well, I think it's a ruddy disgrace" to an underpaid steward and then go and get their delayed train home. 

The venue itself also does half the work. Every adult in the country knows what to shout at the Palladium when the wrong panto character walks on stage, so if someone opens the envelope on Monday evening and tells the room that Yamal had the better season, the reply from the stalls is ready.

Oh no he didn't!