Harry Kane
Seventy-three goals in 64 games for club and country – the second most prolific season by any player in history after Lionel Messi’s 82-goal campaign in 2011-12 – not bad for a man who once sat on the bench alongside Jamie Vardy in the Championship. Harry Kane was not a teenage prodigy like a few of the other players on this list but here he is crashing football’s top table at the age of 33.
It feels strange that a player who has scored at least 24 goals in each of the last 12 seasons, has won back-to-back Golden Boots in the Premier League, a World Cup Golden Boot and two European Golden Shoes, has never finished higher than 10th in Ballon d’Or voting.
The numbers were always there but now he is adding the silverware. Kane’s trophy drought ended when Bayern Munich won the Bundesliga last year and that triumph has opened the floodgates. Another Bundesliga title followed this season, alongside the DFB-Pokal and German Supercup.
England did not end their trophy drought at the World Cup but their captain scored six goals and overtook Gary Lineker as England’s top scorer at the tournament, ensuring he remained in contention for the Ballon d’Or.
Lamine Yamal
“It’s about being calm. When I’m in the area with the ball, I decide what happens,” said Lamine Yamal in February after he had scored the first hat-trick of his career in Barcelona’s 4-1 win against Villarreal. For most 19-year-olds this would sound like arrogance, but Yamal is not like most 19-year-olds.
He offered more proof of that this summer. The Spain forward became the first player to appear in a European Championship final and a World Cup final before turning 20 – and he won both. He only scored one goal at the World Cup, which was a modest return by his own lofty standards, but he was influential throughout. He won a gamechanging penalty in the semi-final against France, he made more successful take-ons than Messi across the tournament, and he had a hand in breaking down an Argentina side hellbent on baiting him into a physical duel in the final. He achieved all this after going into the tournament with a hamstring injury. Joe Hart captured the mood best after the final, saying: “Lamine Yamal is 19 years old. What a beautiful day for him. He’s 19 and has completed football.”
Add in the 24 goals and 18 assists he racked up in 45 appearances for Barcelona as they won La Liga and the Supercopa, and he has a strong case to go one better than his runners-up finish in last year’s Ballon d’Or.
Rodri
“We’ll see the real Rodri at the World Cup,” said Pep Guardiola last October, when the Manchester City captain returned to action after suffering an ACL injury. There were doubts that the 2023 Ballon d’Or winner would ever return to his best. But, as with most things in football, Guardiola was right.
Rodri was the heartbeat and the safety blanket in the Spain team, dictating every phase of the game, controlling possession and extinguishing almost every danger posed to his backline – Spain only conceded one goal in their eight matches at the tournament. Rodri completed 756 passes (more than anyone at the tournament) and he also topped the charts for touches, line-breaking passes and passes in the opposition third. In the final alone he completed 101 passes, completely strangling the life out of Argentina to the extent that they did not have a single shot on target.
He lifted the trophy as Spain’s captain, won the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player and earned a place in one of football’s most exclusive clubs as only the fourth man in history to have won the World Cup, European Championship, European Cup and Ballon d’Or, joining Gerd Müller, Franz Beckenbauer and Zinedine Zidane.
Kylian Mbappé
Kylian Mbappé went toe-to-toe with his old Paris Saint-Germain teammate Lionel Messi at the World Cup. They battled it out for the trophy, the Golden Boot, the Golden Ball and a place in the history books as the competition’s all-time leading scorer. He won two of the four. His two goals in the third-place playoff against England ensured he became the first man to win the Golden Boot twice. It also brought him to 22 goals in World Cups – one more than Messi – and made him the first man to reach double figures in a single edition since Müller in 1970.
And yet, it was not what Mbappé wanted. “I would have preferred not to be the top scorer and to have played in the final,” said the France captain. His domestic season was also prolific but disappointing, bringing goals and individual glory but no silverware. He scored 42 goals in 44 appearances, finishing the season as the top scorer in La Liga and the Champions League, but he did not win either trophy. The goals flowed but the medals did not follow. As Kane has discovered, goals alone are rarely enough to win the Ballon d’Or.
Lionel Messi
Lionel Messi sat on the floor alone in a stadium of 80,000 people, boots off, staring into the distance as Spain’s substitutes streamed past him in celebration. It was not the fairytale image the Argentina captain had envisioned as he left the world stage. And, given his performances over the previous six weeks, it felt as if he deserved better even if his team did not.
Some expected Messi’s tournament to be a nostalgia act – a former great wheeled out for one last World Cup as he prepares for his 40th birthday. But then he went and scored a hat-trick in Argentina’s first game. He scored twice against Austria, then added another against Jordan. He stamped his authority on the tournament in the group stage and proceeded to drag Argentina through the knockouts: a goal against Cape Verde, a goal and an assist against Egypt, an assist against Switzerland, and two more assists to sink England in the semi-final. Had it not been for Mbappé’s brace in a bizarre third-place playoff, he would have collected the Golden Boot.
Could he win the Ballon d’Or having lost the World Cup final? In only four of the last 19 years has the award gone to a player who did not win the Champions League, World Cup, European Championship or Copa América in the same year. But three of them were won by Messi. A ninth Ballon d’Or is unlikely but the fact he is in this conversation at all – at 39 while playing in MLS having lost a final – is testament to his greatness.
This is an article by WhoScored
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