Who actually deserves the 2026 Ballon d’Or? Based entirely objectively on 2025-26 stats | OneFootball

It’s anyone’s guess who’ll be winning the Ballon d’Or this year after the World Cup threw a bit of a spanner in the works.

Every four years, the World Cup has a massive weighting on the Ballon d’Or. But in this year’s World Cup winning team, the star player was Rodri – someone who wasn’t regularly at his best over the course of the club season with Manchester City. In contrast, Lamine Yamal, who was brilliant for title-winning Barcelona, wasn’t as influential to Spain’s World Cup win.

Further afield, the likes of Harry Kane, Michael Olise, defending champion Ousmane Dembele and, yes, a certain Lionel Messi have all been mentioned in the conversation.

So some clever clogs has decided to do the hard work for us by devising a system to statistically work out who deserves the top prize.

Reddit user Codaq3 has come up with a model that takes into account various metrics to create a scale of how deserving each of the main contenders for the Ballon d’Or would be.

Allow them to explain: “There has been a lot of discussion about who deserves this year’s Ballon d’Or, so I wanted to put the main contenders side by side. I collected some of the most important statistics and achievements to compare 12 of the current favourites.

“The graphic compares their goals, assists, goal contributions, trophies, all-competition Player of the Match awards and major individual honours. Gold, silver and bronze highlight the top three in each category.

“It also uses a simple weighted model-40% G+A, 20% POTM, 20% trophies, 12% Player of the Season/Tournament awards and 8% Golden Boots-to produce a provisional ranking.

“This is not a perfect or definitive way to decide the winner. I understand that not every league is of equal strength, not every trophy carries the same value and not every match has the same importance. The model also cannot fully account for tactical roles, defensive contribution or the context behind individual performances. Even so, I think it provides a useful and interesting dataset for comparing the leading candidates on a consistent basis.

“This ranking naturally favours attackers, which applies to almost all of the listed favourites apart from Rodri. His attacking output should therefore be largely disregarded in the Ballon d’Or discussion, but I still felt obliged to include him because of his overall influence and place among the leading candidates. Messi also plays on a different calendar because of the MLS season, so l recorded his statistics from 1 September 2025 onwards to align them more closely with the beginning of the European season.”

Good for us. We think.

So, who comes out on top via the model? The ranking is as follows…

Yep, that does have Denis Undav above Rodri. Who invited him? They weren’t kidding when they said it wasn’t fool proof.

Of course, that will largely be down to the favourability this model places on attackers.

But at the top end? As you’ll have seen if you’ve been keeping up with our power rankings, we reckon Kane deserves the Ballon d’Or, so we now have some empirical proof to back that up.

But will he actually win? We’ll find out on October 26.